“I don’t know. I would like an answer.”
“Never hit it off, I guess, not well enough to contract.”
“I find that hard to believe. Not even short-term?”
“With my background …” I found myself telling her about my parents, with their single life contract, totally in love and totally faithful, so far as I knew, for I didn’t know how many centuries. I didn’t tell her how they’d disappeared together as well. “ … and with that sort of example, anything short-term seems, I don’t know, so … so … why bother with a contract if it’s not for a while?”
“You do make it difficult, don’t you? Do your parents believe in a series of absolutes?”
“Probably. They don’t believe much in the Guard, that’s for sure.” I went on to spill the story of my disappointments when I’d been accepted after my Test.
“So you have to believe in the Guard and its traditions, don’t you?”
That was too stiff even for the best side of my better nature. “Do you always carve up people when they unbend and reveal a bit of themselves?”
“Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry, just amused, as if she’d uncovered a rare and unusual species of some sort.
All the inns are self-service. And it was a fine time for a break from the inquisition. I got up and strolled over to the synthesizer to pick out a grilled Atlantean fishray, whatever that was, and a beaker of firejuice.
The synthesizer hummed, burped, and presented me with the beaker and a steaming platter of something that wasn’t defined but smelled pretty fair.
Verdis selected something from Gorratte and a dark ale from Terra.
We ate without conversation.
Finally, Verdis broke the silence. “Why do you accept all those impossible missions, especially when you and Heimdall don’t get along?”
“Someone has to do them.” That wasn’t totally true. I didn’t know what to say. Besides, there hadn’t been that many, maybe only a dozen.
“Why don’t Sammis and Wryan do some? Or Gilmesh? He’s supposed to be a good diver.” She took another bite from her plate, not quite looking at me.
“I don’t know about Gilmesh, but Sammis and Wryan do.” I shrugged. “Sometimes the hard ones … I don’t know … I feel good when I can do them.”
“You like proving you’re the best?”
Answering that could put me on very dangerous ground. “It’s more that I like accomplishing something that can be measured. Maybe that’s why I like Maintenance. If I build something or fix it, I can look at it and say I did it.”
“That implies you aren’t too impressed with Personnel.”
I wasn’t, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say so. “I think each Guard has to do what fits him—or her,” I added quickly. “Maintenance fits me. It wouldn’t suit most people.”
“I suppose that follows,” she said after a bite from her plate. “You seem to like hard facts and answers and results.” She paused. “Is life really like that, Loki? Is everything so certain?”
I swallowed a too-big mouthful of fishray before answering. It scraped all the way down my throat, and I had to gulp down some firejuice. “No. But I have trouble when I get on shifting sands. Why is it all right to meddle with one culture and not another? Do we only play with those that would be a threat? Who defines what that threat is?”
“So you just do the job as well as you can and try not to deal with those thoughts?”
I winced. She was probably right—except I hadn’t done that on Toltek. “Not always. I think more now, and I did persuade them to leave Toltek alone.”
“Hmmmm …”
I didn’t like the sound of the “hmmm,” but I couldn’t think of anything to add.
“Don’t people live and die whether we meddle or not?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“So … if you don’t kill any of these beings personally, what’s the difference? They’ll live and die just the same.”
“There is a difference,” I said even more reluctantly. “What that says …” I had to grope for the words, and the instants dragged out, but Verdis waited. “ … is that it’s wrong to kill one being face-to-face, but it’s all right to destroy cultures. I don’t believe that.”
“You do have a problem, don’t you?”
We talked some more, but that was it. It seemed to me that she really didn’t understand that the idea of dead being dead applied to whole groups of people, whether they were born on Query or not.
I didn’t go out to eat with Verdis for the rest of the time I was in Personnel. I stayed there for five days, and that was too long. I didn’t get any new insights, just more aspects of the same questions, and there wasn’t much else I could suggest to improve the place, because form follows function. No one was about to change the function.
Somehow, someway, something I had said had turned Verdis completely off. She was friendly, friendlier than when I’d first showed up in Personnel, but behind the pleasantness was a definite reserve.
Gilmesh returned to his empire after the six-day period, and I went back down to Maintenance with a head full of unanswered questions, still not knowing where to find real answers, feeling like all my communications
were being monitored by “them,” whoever “they” happened to be. I was far from certain even how many “theys” there might be.
I settled back into my space in the Maintenance Hall with a sigh of relief, however temporary it might be.
THERE WERE NEVER any alarms, no shrieking sirens, clanging bells. The Temporal Guard proceeded at a measured pace—with few exceptions. With eternity to work in, the Tribunes could afford the luxury of actions planned quietly in their secluded conference room—the one that no one had ever seen but the Tribunes—except I’d looked once from the undertime.
It had seemed normal except for the table, which somehow shimmered black even in the undertime and almost threw sparks beneath the surface of the now. What it was, I didn’t know, except that it was definitely connected with time and diving, and with such connections, I was reluctant to break out where I wasn’t supposed to be. I was also sure I wasn’t the only one with snoops around.
Still, “eternity,” even as practiced by the Tribunes, was a relative term. Practically speaking, most Guard actions had to be restricted to the past. I could manage time-diving not quite two million years back and about six thousand forward. But trying to work anywhere foretime was confusing. At the forward end of my range, I felt like everything had multiple images and shimmered as if it weren’t quite real, or hadn’t been quite nailed down into reality. It hadn’t, of course, and foretime changes didn’t always take. It’s hard to change what might not even be.
Sometimes, over dinner at an inn, we’d discuss the questions of whether what we did had to be done, because in the overall scheme of things, because we did them, they then had to have been done—a sort of pre-ordained predestination. I didn’t believe it—mainly because of the change winds. If it were all to be the way we made it by Guard meddling, there would never be change winds, because the universe couldn’t be any different.
The present is the result of what happened, but some of what happened can be changed by outsiders. I can’t go back and kill my grandfather, or the grandfather of anyone else on Query, but I could go kill the former Grand High Vizier on Sertis. Sometimes it changes things. Sometimes not. Time doesn’t like to be changed, which is why Guard actions can get pretty violent.
The most violent ones I seemed to get, and more and more often they were heralded by the arrival of Nicodemus. As the years passed, even after he became a full Guard, Heimdall’s assistant entered Maintenance more and more gingerly.
“Sir …”
“Another screwball mission from Heimdall … right? I’ll be there shortly.”
Heimdall wasn’t in Assignments, and Frey was seated beside the supervisor’s console. Sammis was seated next to him in a low stool, and Nicodemus eased into another one.
“Heimdall will be right back,” offered Frey. “But this one is tailor-made for you.” For once Frey had the light saber stowed someplace, and he wore a standard jumpsuit instead of black nightmail.
The phrase “made for you” triggered all sorts of mental alarms.
“Hmmm …” I responded cautiously, glancing around the Assignments Hall.
Sammis sat in his stool almost stiffly, looking at the glowstones, and there were deep circles under his eyes.
“Let’s get on with it,” groused Heimdall from the archway.
Frey damped the slow-glass panels, darkening the room. A full-length holo flashed onto the wall screen. Simple real-time star plate—I studied it, but I didn’t see anything remarkable, not that I probably could have told a remarkable one from an unremarkable one.
“Sammis was scouting the fringes and came across this,” Heimdall said as he climbed back into his high stool.
In the dimness, Sammis looked blankly at the screen.
I waited.
“Typical star plate,” observed Heimdall, “except what’s important is what’s not there.” He flicked a stud on the controls, and another holo appeared beside the first one. It seemed similar, virtually the same shot, but there were differences.
My first conclusion was that the same point had been taken at different times, but that was so obvious there had to be more.
“Midway down … on the right,” cut in Frey, trying to be helpful, but sounding officious.
As it penetrated, I gasped.
In the first holo, what Frey had called our attention to was a brilliant star cluster. In the second, the cluster was overshadowed by a trio of even more brilliant points of light.
“Times?” I asked.
Heimdall grinned, pleased that he’d gotten some interest from me.
“The first holo is now, roughly. The second holo is uptime about ten centuries.”
“Three stars going nova simultaneously is pretty rare. You’re implying that it’s not natural.”
Heimdall shut down the grin before he turned toward Sammis, who remained stone-faced. Heimdall’s voice lowered, almost with a syrupy sound. “This next series shows a season’s span in a few units.”
I watched as one star flared, then another, then the third.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Several things,” Heimdall said. “First, you should know that there’s something there extraordinarily dangerous.” He nodded toward Sammis. “Do you want to add anything?”
Sammis shook his head. He looked like hell.
“The cost of these shots was high. Wryan got in the way of these creatures …”
Heimdall may have said more, but I missed it, as my eyes went back to Sammis. No wonder he looked like hell. He seldom went anywhere without her, or vice versa.
I swallowed. These things happened, but I found it hard to believe. They’d been around so long, and seemed so much a part of each other. I shook my head and looked back at Sammis. Poor bastard.
Wryan and Sammis—the long-contract pair. Maybe the only ones I knew besides my parents … and they were severed—not even together.
“Loki?” Heimdall’s raspy voice brought me back to the wall screen—sort of.
I was still thinking about Wryan and her comments about my deficient knife work.
“ … anything that’s quick enough to get Wryan …”
Heimdall was droning on, but I still had trouble concentrating on the mission, whatever it was. Wryan … gone?
“Loki?”
“Sorry …” I shook my head and looked at Sammis again. He wouldn’t look at me or Heimdall. He just looked as if he wanted out of there. So I swallowed and listened.
“ … Sammis and Wryan made the foretime holo first, then went real-time into the cluster. It’s out beyond Terra, by the way, beyond the Guard’s current fringe, you know,” Heimdall explained. “They tried to be cautious …”
At that point Sammis stood up and left. Heimdall kept talking, but I tried to wave, gesture something of sympathy, but he wasn’t looking my way. I really wanted to throttle Heimdall. Instead I kept listening.
“ … out in deep space near a G-type star … within two units of breakout, a warship fried Wryan … almost as if they knew she was there. Sammis managed to get away and took a few more shots on the way back.”
Heimdall undamped the slow-glass and pointed to the table across from him. “There’s what he got on the ships.”
The hard-copy holos were laid out for me.
For all my fiddling around back- and foretime, I’d never seen anything resembling them. Shark ships, shining black in the darkness of space, were caught in the act of destruction, destroying smaller ships of another type, annihilating crippled ships of their own fleet, blasting a moon station. There were others—one frame of a purple planet under a normal yellow sun; a frame of a series of orbit fortresses, deserted, pitted, and holed; a frame of a planet with a molten surface, circled by an ancient and cratered moon.
Destruction … fire … that was the theme.
For a long time I sat at the table. No one said anything, not even Heimdall.
If anything, most scouts brought back too many shots, but it was apparent that Sammis had struggled to bring back a handful from the cluster, the shark cluster.
I finally looked at Heimdall, the question on my mind.
“Because the sharks are getting out of the cluster, and they seem to have some way of detecting in the undertime.”
That set me back in the stool. I didn’t like playing god, but, if the shots brought back by Sammis were accurate, and I trusted Sammis a lot more than Heimdall, the sharks made the Guard look like philanthropists.
Heimdall raised his eyebrows.
I knew it was going to be messy … and long—if I could even do it.
“I’ll look at it.” Then I got up and walked out of Assignments. I wanted to find Sammis, but he wasn’t anywhere around, and no one had seen him.
As I walked down the ramp to Maintenance, for the first time I was face-to-face with an assignment that looked like genocide, pure and simple. Sure, I’d heard the stories about Odin Thor, even as gory as depicted by Wryan and Sammis … I stopped again, wondering what Sammis would do. They’d been such a pair.
I swallowed and kept walking. In all the stories, though, the changes had been almost by-products, allowing peoples to destroy themselves, opportunities which they had willingly taken.
In recent times, though, and maybe never, no Guard had gone out
to remove a race. Now Heimdall and company, sitting around their consoles like the sweet young ladies of bygone High Sinopol, were going to urge on their current candidate for hero.
Great, I thought to myself. So I was going to be a hero—if I made it. Wryan hadn’t, and she had so much more experience and knowledge than I did that there was no comparison. The only advantage I had was that I knew the shark people were there and vicious, while she hadn’t.
The shark people were something else—destroying anything that wasn’t theirs, frying their own cripples, melting down planetary surfaces, undertaking target practice on research stations. A charming bunch, and I really hadn’t even made their acquaintance yet.
I was a coward, and ready to admit it. If there were any easy ways to get the job done, I’d try them. Dead heroes were just that—dead.
I cornered Brendan as soon as I got back into Maintenance. “I’ve been drafted as a hero. Going to take twenty, thirty days, if not longer. You’ve got it.”
I left him standing there flat-footed. He’d keep things running. I didn’t have any doubts about that.
The next step was to go back to Assignments and get the rest of the briefing. That didn’t take long because there wasn’t much more available, basically the temporal and spacial coordinates.
After that I had to round up the equipment I needed. I’d already decided that I would be deep-diving, not that I was about to tell Heimdall that, and I intended to be prepared. Since I was limited in what I could carry and still function, I was selective: warm suit with sealed breather option, a belt nav-recorder, miniature holopak, and most important a remote life/energy detector that I could drop into real-time while staying undertime myself. The detector just might help me avoid the same fate as Wryan.
After lining it all up in the Guard’s equipment room, I walked out of the Tower and slid home to the Aerie. The next morning was early enough for a reluctant hero. As I sat behind the permaglass, watching the twilight spread across the Bardwalls, everything seemed sort of empty, meaningless. Was I going to be assigned more and more difficult diving missions, year after year, until I was either dead or resigned from active diving?
What was the purpose of it all? And why had Frey been there at the first briefing?
I sipped firejuice until long after night fell. In the end, I decided that the questions were just a way of telling myself that I was scared—more of the unknown than the sharks.
For all the fuss and furor of the day before, only Sammis was at the
Travel Hall the next morning when I arrived to suit up.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, now knowing what else to say.
“Thank you … Loki. I appreciate the thought.” He looked at the floor, and he didn’t say much more, just pleasantries, to which I responded with other pleasantries.
Still, it was funny how he was always around, and on good terms with everyone. Wryan had been too, and I had to admit that I missed her. But I swallowed and pulled on the rest of my gear.
From the instant of mind-chill with the departure from the Hall, I was tense. Wryan was the first immortal I’d known closely who had gotten zapped, and the holo shots Sammis had brought back had conveyed all too starkly the sheer destructiveness of the culture I was tracking.
I had planned to backtime to the limit of my range, a good two million years back, and work forward, trying to reduce the risk factor. I used an angle approach dropping backtime as I neared the cluster, because I didn’t want to be near the present, even undertime, when I reached it.
When a diver reached range limit, it felt like the paths and time branches were all curling back with a searing red-fire edging. I stopped as soon as I sensed the curl, dropped into the now on a cold airless moon for the instant necessary to check the register, and my blood chilled—more than the temperature around me—and I dropped undertime. The readout had registered at a touch over a million years back, half of what my spinning mind insisted that it should.