She hadn’t quite come out and said it, but it was close enough, and she made sense, too much sense.
The gauntlets would have to wait. Brendan had already carried all my equipment down to my bench for repairs while we had stayed with Hycretis for observation. There wasn’t much I could do while I waited for Heimdall to debrief Derron.
That didn’t take too long, and Nicodemus came after me.
Heimdall was leaning back in his stool right where I’d left him—had it been one or two days before? I wasn’t sure.
“Derron and Patrice have filled me in on what happened to them, except for how you got them out of the dungeon. The Toltekians ‘screamed’ when you appeared, and that knocked them out, I gather. What happened?”
I told Heimdall what I’d done, from the point where I’d broken out on the green sand beach at night until the time when I staggered onto the knoll on Faffnir with Patrice and Derron in tow. I did not mention the state of my gauntlets.
He nodded as I recited, muttering at one point something about “sheer brute force.” A matter of opinion, I thought. At least, I hadn’t used any more force than necessary, nor destroyed the planet.
I stopped.
“You all agree on the sonic control,” Heimdall noted. “What sort of follow-up would you recommend?”
“Do we need any? I’d have to revise my earlier judgment. I don’t think the tech level is as high as I figured, and the Toltekians are so sensitive to light that they could certainly be controlled if necessary. From a safe distance,” I added.
Heimdall smiled at that.
I added a last judgment. “I think the planetary engineering is more a result of extensive social control and sonics than ultra-high-tech.”
Heimdall punched a code on his keyboard and leaned back so that I could see the picture that formed. The holo shots zeroed in on one of the Toltekians cities. As I watched, a whole section collapsed in on itself, thundering down into a crater filled with rubble.
“Sammis and Wryan went out last night to get a series of follow-up shots. I thought you might have left a trail.” He laughed, a short bark that wasn’t expressing humor. “Your demolition cubes covered your tracks adequately, although they may have been an overreaction.”
Overreaction? Heimdall hadn’t been out there getting himself shaken apart.
“Sammis does agree with all three of you that further retaliation is totally unnecessary, but that further monitoring should be undertaken—from your safe distance, Loki.”
I repressed a sigh of relief. Even if they weren’t human, I really wouldn’t have wanted to have fried them out of existence.
“There’s one question that still hasn’t been answered.”
I stiffened.
“When the Toltekians ‘screamed,’ the others were stunned. You were hardly affected. Why not?”
“I don’t know. The first time, on the beach, it was hard, really hard, to get undertime. The second time I was mad, wasn’t thinking much about it, and it didn’t seem to affect me as much. I don’t know why. Hycretis gave me some hearing tests, but my ears are fine. Maybe the effect isn’t as strong after a while or if you can concentrate.” I shrugged. My guess was that I was just stubborn enough to be able to concentrate a bit more. “I don’t know, Counselor. I just don’t know.”
The title seemed to help, and Heimdall relaxed a trace.
“Is that all?”
“That’s all.”
I got up from the lower stool and went out through the main archway. Started down the ramps to Maintenance, but I wasn’t really watching where I was going and barely avoided crashing into Sammis. Wryan was next to him and smiled.
Then they were gone.
I was still mulling over the gauntlet bit. I had checked them on Faffnir before Patrice had awakened, and I was certain they were so much fused metal. I could certainly tell busted equipment from functional. I’d thrown a thunderbolt without a gauntlet—just one for certain. But could I do it again? I wasn’t about to try in the Tower, or with anyone around.
I nodded at Narcissus, but headed straight for my bench, where the gauntlets lay, fused. One chance remained. One of them still might be
operational, for all the melted exterior. I studied them, then removed the power cells, and had to cut away metal to get one free. The cells had no charge. I placed the left gauntlet in the diagnostic center. “Non-functioning” the console scripted out, following the caption with an extensive list of malfunctions.
The right one was diagnosed the same way.
So I had another problem—and Patrice’s point about gods and technology. I still didn’t know if I could do it again, if I had any control, or if it had all been a fluke. My guts told me it wasn’t, but I didn’t know yet, and Baldur’s philosophy of checking and testing told me to take it step by step. Somehow I thought I’d better. Even if she didn’t think so, I had listened to Patrice.
Heimdall, also, had been too polite and deferential, and that nagged at me. In the meantime, I had to get back to the day-to-day business of Maintenance, because Brendan was working with Justina’s people on console malfunctions, and Narcissus had gone back to more polishing than repairs.
That evening came quickly, but tiredness even sooner.
Diving, especially rescue diving, takes a toll, and after Toltek one night’s sleep just hadn’t been enough. It couldn’t have been more than fifty units after I’d walked out of the South Portal of the Tower before I was on my pallet in the Aerie, feeling my eyelids close.
Most nights I slept without dreaming, or if I did dream, I didn’t remember. Once in a while, I had a dream so vivid it was real, no dream at all. I could tell that kind only because the subjects were usually so unreal. The dream I had after the Toltek rescue was different, if indeed the events were part of a dream.
Some sense of energy, of power, a tingling in the air around me, pulled me from sleep, but I felt so light, so filled with energy, I knew it had to be a dream.
It couldn’t be happening, not when I’d fallen asleep so exhausted.
With the exception of the muted light from the glowstone floors, the Aerie was dark. I looked around, half sitting, trying to puzzle out what had brought me from such a deep sleep.
Nothing … no one … but an uneasy feeling grew, centered on a point in the middle of the room.
I eased to my feet with a fluid motion so swift it had to be unreal. The walls, each glowstone, the permaglass overlooking the cliffs, all stood out in the darkness in relief, outlined with a reflected energy from somewhere.
I walked across the room, hovering above the glowstones, trying to pinpoint that sense of danger. I couldn’t explain it, but the energy that
outlined the room, the same energy that filled and refreshed me—that unseen force that coursed through my veins like fire—was the danger. As I waited, at the absolute center of the Aerie, a point of starlight burned, pulsing, pushing its way out from the undertime. The room filled with blinding light, heat, and power.
Without thinking, I gestured, pushed the light back where it came from, banished it into the undertime. I couldn’t have explained how, but I did. I wanted it gone, and it was. Realtime wavered for a few instants, rippled by the vanishing energy, before stabilizing, and the remaining energy lingered in the Aerie, the outlines which had put everything in relief fading slowly. The heat dissipated even more slowly. I felt sleepy, filled with warmth, and curled up on top of my sleeping furs.
When the sun struck me full in the face at dawn, I was still curled on top of the furs. The Aerie was warm and the dream still clear in my mind. As I uncurled I felt better than I had in seasons, relaxed and refreshed. After wondering exactly what the dream had to do with the feeling, I washed up, dressed, and downed some biscuits and firejuice, ready for a quick slide to the Tower and the work that was waiting.
The Tower was quiet, the ramps vacant, when I arrived earlier than normal, and bounded down the incline to Maintenance.
I had zipped through several routine jobs, a gauntlet that might have been wedged in a corner for millennia the circuitry was so old, a pair of stunners that a synthesizer had been dropped on, by the time Brendan rushed in.
“Loki, have you heard the latest?” He stopped and whistled. “Where did you get that tan?”
“Tan?” The time on Faffnir hadn’t been enough to darken my face that much. Was I more tanned?
“What’s the latest?” I didn’t really know what to say about the tan.
“Sun-tunnel blew on some of Frey’s people. Hycretis has them closeted in the old wards of the Infirmary. Hush-hush, that sort of thing, but Lynia had duty last night, and I wouldn’t let her in until she told me.”
Lynia must have been his contract, but Brendan hadn’t mentioned her before. Even as a full junior Guard, he was too young, by custom at least, to enter a full contract.
“Told you what?” I was thinking about Lynia—barely out of training—and about how it had been with Loragerd.
“Loki, were you listening?” He laughed.
I grinned back. “Sort of. Lynia had to work late …”
“No … she had duty. Hycretis and Gerrond had to work most of
the night patching people up. Some of the divers were badly burned. Must have been something …”
“What were Frey’s people doing with a sun-tunnel? How could one do that? It either works or it doesn’t. And if they dropped it into real-time where they were, there wouldn’t be even cinders left.”
“I know,” mused Brendan. “But Lynia said five had to stay in the Infirmary, and all the regenerators were in use. One of them was screaming ‘impossible’ over and over.”
“Strange.” I tried to keep my voice level. “Very strange. But we still have some backlogged stuff.”
“Strange” wasn’t the word. I felt a cold fear rising in the back of my mind, like a wave. While it couldn’t have had anything to do with my dream, I knew the sun-tunnel did, and it was part of the gauntlet question. While it might have been coincidence, with my subconscious tuning in to the disaster, I didn’t think so. And I didn’t like the idea of Frey playing with sun-tunnels.
“About that tan?” Brendan asked again.
“Got stuck on Faffnir after the mess on Toltek.”
He nodded.
No one else I ran into ever mentioned the Guards in the Infirmary, and I never knew their names. Frey would have been the only one I could have asked, besides Hycretis.
But when I cornered Hycretis, he just nodded and said, “I get so many odd injuries, Loki, I just can’t remember.” He looked sad, and that bothered me, but Frey, or Heimdall, had gotten to him.
I got on with reorganizing Maintenance and trying to figure out exactly what I could and couldn’t do with and without equipment.
THE HAIR OF the man dressed in black flashes like flame against the dawn sky. “Man” is a general term, not entirely appropriate.
Thunderclouds mass to the west, growling at the puny figure who hangs motionless in the empty air above the mountains. The sun peeks over the lower hills to the east, as if uncertain about entering the conflict. For it is a conflict, a confrontation between forces.
The storm roars and rears its hammer over the man, who, suspended like a black candle between the clouds above and the rocks below, would block the descending arm of nature.
The eastern heavens pink, and to the west, under the fringe of the thunder-storm,
the distant horizon skies have the black shades pulled down.
A blast of energy lances from the mountain
tip
below the man toward the clouds.
He lifts his left arm. The jagged fire smooth-bends, and he gathers it unto him. He glows momentarily in the dawn like a
sun-point.
His left arm straightens as he hurls the lightning against a more distant peak.
His sudden laugh would shatter the towers of the cities of men, were they near, for all its moderate pitch. The mountains shrink beneath that laughter, though they move not, and his insignificant figure standing on nothing but air
between the mighty peaks somehow dwarves them all.
With a third thunderclap, the man in black is gone, and the dawn proceeds on schedule, with only the echo of his laugh reminding the sundered stones and the wilted storm that a god has stood above them.
SEASONS, YEARS, CAN often pass before a Guard knows it, even an impatient one with a purpose. Much always had to be done, and there were few enough Guards to accomplish the mere monitoring of our corner of the galaxy, small as it was in comparison to all the stars in the night sky.
Through it all, I kept puzzling out the old equipment and machines in the Maintenance Hall, determined to uncover the principles behind each design. That was a straightforward task, and more unfortunately, generally disappointing. Despite their size, they were uniformly simpler than they appeared, with one or two exceptions.
Harder was the effort to master the material left in Baldur’s console.
Not so direct as mastering either hardware or technology was the self-imposed goal of increasing my own personal abilities. At first, the hardest of tasks had been working with Sammis and Wryan. As the seasons passed, the sessions had become more and more sophisticated and less and less frequent. Finally, Sammis called a halt.
“You know more than either of us, and probably more than any Guard does, and that’s far too much for your own good. You’ve attained too much ability, too much raw knowledge, and not enough wisdom. Try to take a break. Watch things happen, and let a little time flow around you.”
By then, I’d already decided that I needed more than mere improvement in physical or diving abilities.
Some of the stunts I attempted after Sammis and Wryan called off physical training were stupid, like catching thunderbolts, trying to tap solar flares through the undertime, or trying to string together continuous split entries to fly in real-time. I could fly, sort of, but it was more work than it was worth. Overall, I didn’t spend that much time on experimental stuff, but it was fun to try, and playing with the storms above the Bardwalls was exhilarating.
When I wasn’t in the Aerie, still adding to it or fixing it up, I spent a lot of time around the Tower, mostly in Maintenance. I picked up a new trainee, finally, a woman named Elene, who rated somewhere between Narcissus and Brendan in ability—another redhead, but a lot calmer than I had been, than I still was, probably.
I took some considerable pride in the fact that we had everything in the Tower working. Heimdall couldn’t find anything to complain about, but he still did. Getting on top of the repairs gave us time to redesign the entire Maintenance Hall and to dig up some better repair consoles, suitably modified, from Weindre. I got rid of a few of the totally obsolete behemoths that no one had ever used, and I don’t think Heimdall ever noticed. To him, a machine was a machine was a machine.
A messenger interrupted me on a morning no different from any other spring morning in Quest. He was one of the newer trainees—Giron. He arrived as I was puzzling over the design of an incomprehensible, for the moment, Gurlenian “artifact” brought in by Zealor.
“Tribune Kranos requests the honor of your presence, sir.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Sir?”
“Tell the honored Tribune I will be there as soon as I get the grime off my hands.”
What did Kranos want? He normally avoided me like the plague. If the Tribunes wanted something, Freyda was the one to drop it on me, usually. Once or twice Eranas had.
I sighed, flipped the artifact partly out-of-time-phase to make sure no one else casually fiddled with it. Narcissus was getting too damned curious for his own good, fueled by the fact that he’d learned a bunch of repairs by rote. He still didn’t understand, and he didn’t have the talents, either mechanical or diving, to get himself out of the jams his nosiness created.
A few days earlier, he’d tried to discover the purpose of the back-row machine that assembled atmospheric shield units, and if I had been any slower he would have had one planted in his shoulder. It worked on a mass-focus assembly system. While uptime Weindrian equipment took one-third the space and power, I was still trying to figure out the theory
behind mass-focus systems. I’d forgotten to refocus the time protection, and Narcissus was trying to energize the equipment with his shoulder halfway into the focusing point. Narcissus had almost paid for both our curiosities, but he hadn’t, and that was what counted, I supposed.
I wiped off my hands, straightened my jumpsuit, and marched up the ramps to Kranos’s chambers.
Blunt as always, he had a proposition stated before I sat down on the stool across from him.
“Loki, I’d like you to take a short leave of absence from Maintenance and see if you can give the admin people a hand in designing a better personnel system. You’ve done wonders in Maintenance.”
“Why?” That was a question I’d asked too often. “I know as much about administration as this stool does.”
Kranos’s stern face was always smooth, and with his thick and unruly hair, made you think he was an animated statue on loan from the Archives gallery. We didn’t have much sculpture, and none of it was animated. People with such long lifespans don’t need as much to remind them of the past they’ve experienced. Besides, if it were really old, no one outside the Guard really cared—except people like my parents, and even they’d left all the traditions behind when they vanished.
Kranos didn’t blink an eye at my question. “You have a different outlook. We need new perspectives to make sure the system keeps working.”
“You’ve got plenty of new blood. What about Verdis or Lorren? I would certainly think Gilmesh would run a tight shop.”
Kranos smiled a smile that wasn’t real. His eyes stayed level while the corners of his mouth turned up. “Too tight. No one wants to think about change. But he’s going over to Locator for the same time to give them a shake-up.”
In the whole time I’d been in the Guard, I’d never heard of such a switch. Suggestions were freely offered between supervisors anyway, except to Maintenance, but that was different, I thought. So why did Kranos want me out of Maintenance?
“Why do you want me out of Maintenance?”
“I don’t. I want you
in
Personnel. If you want, I’ll even seal the Maintenance Hall while you’re gone.”
Although that was unrealistic, I believed the spirit of his offer. The question was why he wanted me in Personnel, and it looked like the only way to find out was to agree. “When?”
“As soon as you want to.”
“Fine. How about tomorrow?” The sooner I went through whatever the Tribunes had in mind, the better.
Kranos’s expression didn’t change, but I had the distinct impression that he was relieved, as if he’d been asked to play a role for someone else and was pleased to have carried it off.
The next morning I was sitting on Gilmesh’s padded stool, looking at Personnel tracers. None of it made any sense. I had to start asking questions. At first, even the answers didn’t make sense. Finally, I commandeered Verdis, set her stool across the worktable from me, and got the system explained from scratch.
She had entered training a year or two before I had, and like many of the key support people, wasn’t much of a diver, but as I had begun to discover, without her or Ferrin or Loragerd or a bunch of semi-divers, the Guard organization would have been hard-pressed to function.
Verdis was a redhead, with shoulder-length hair verging on a shade of mahogany, black eyes, and a shortish nose. She often expressed her feelings with her whole body.
She was expressing impatience.
“ … we take the exact time periods of each assignment. That gives us a backup to the Locator system. The accuracy is important, and that’s why divers are taught to check and verify the wrist gauntlet readouts immediately upon return …”
I understood that need. What I didn’t understand was another backup to the computerized Locator system.
“But why the backup in Personnel?” I finally asked.
“Because Locator only handles diving records of active divers. If they want to sort for a rescue, it would delay things too much, and priority goes to active Guards …”
I frowned. In a way that made sense, but there were only around four thousand active Guards, including Guards like Verdis. All of the records were stored in the Personnel system computer and in the main Archives data banks.
It still seemed like a lot of duplication, especially since five people essentially ran Personnel—Gilmesh, Verdis, Lorren, and two trainees. The trainees basically ran duplicate data blocs into the system daily.
The rest of Personnel dealt with assignments and history. My record showed the times in various duties, from the time I was a trainee onward, but that didn’t take that much space in the records. After they became Guards, people didn’t shift that much, or at least not often.
And even updating the diving didn’t take that much effort, it seemed to me. All in all, about four hundred timedivers were out on continued assignment at any one time. Another two hundred were involved in short or routine dives.
Why were there more divers on extended dives? I hadn’t thought
about it, but the answers became clear as I thought. First, a diver handling short dives could handle a lot more than one on a continued, say, linguistics assignment. Second, the Law of Real Elapsed Time comes into play. If I dived to Atlantea for ten units of holo-taking, I could not return to Query and break out at any time except ten objective units after my departure. I couldn’t gain or lose time on Query by backtiming or foretiming and then returning to my point of departure.
Like most of the time laws, no one had a good explanation why it worked that way. But it did. My own theory was that, because Time requires a biological synchronization between objective time on Query and objective time experienced by the body, the Law of Elapsed Time is merely a reflection of that synchronization.
Because of the impact, and because deep time-diving is exhausting, Guards on remote assignments are often better off staying on location.
Time flows differently in different parts of the universe. Our body clocks are set by where we are born and run in tune with our home system, by and large, give or take a few time rushes.
If a Guard were caught in a time-flow rush, or more important, missed one, the personal consequences might be severe, I suspected. I thought that a few divers never made it back to Query because their biological clocks got desynced and they couldn’t break out.
Once or twice, I’d noticed that a breakout on return was more difficult than usual. I attributed that to the getting out of phase with the in-system time flows.
No one had done any work on it, not that I knew, despite the Archives’ creation of a time research section—that was one person. Practically speaking, neither Query nor the Guard was big enough to maintain a meaningful research base. We had to borrow our ideas from others, and since the Guard sidetracked any research by other cultures into the nature of time, we didn’t know very much about the “why” of the Laws of Time and only a relatively small amount, I felt, about the “how.”
I hadn’t realized how small Personnel was—and how little real work they did. Compared to Personnel, Maintenance was a bigger operation. I had Narcissus, Brendan, and Elene, plus me, working full-time, and a lot of the simple dings and dents were fixed by second- and third-year trainees.
Maintenance had four full-time personnel; Personnel had three; Assignments twenty, and that included all the divers who did background research; and Medical had close to two hundred spread across Query.
But all that meant that Guard headquarters had perhaps four hundred people. Where were the other thirty-six hundred Guards? I asked.
Verdis gave me an exasperated look. “What does that have to do with tracer forms?”
“It doesn’t, but the question popped into my head.”
“It should have popped into your head in training. Look …” As she talked, Gilmesh’s old trainee sermons began to come back, and the picture made more sense. And she was right; my own experience in Domestic Affairs should have answered the question.
What it boiled down to was that the support functions of the Guard far outweighed the Temporal “police” functions. Query had roughly ten million people, roughly two thousand towns, five thousand villages, and one city—plus a lot of people living where they wanted. All told, Quest wasn’t really a city, not with less than 25,000 scattered around. The largest of the towns, Elysia, contained 8,500; the average village less than 500 people. So Quest had to be called a city, but only relatively.
That was part of the point. Queryans enjoyed the fruits of stolen technology. Even stolen technology has to be distributed, and as I had discovered in Domestic Affairs, even law-abiding people need some police system. The combination of duplicator offices and Domestic Affairs offices took almost three quarters of all Guard personnel.
If someone needed a cooker, for example, or a synthesizer, he didn’t need one more than once every five or ten years, if that. He went to his local Domestic Affairs office, which had mint copies of standard household items, plus a duplicator. Some of the larger offices had several duplicators.
The range of appliances was narrow. Large and small cookers and synthesizers; washers; dryers; hygiene appliances; a variety of hand tools, saws, hammers, wrenches; communits; wordwriters; small hand tractors; a few hunting weapons; and that was about it.