THE SEASONS PASSED. Like Baldur before me, I kept myself in Maintenance when I wasn’t stalking thunderstorms in the passes of the Bardwalls or bending lasers into light sculptures around the Aerie. I even got so I could heal cuts and scrapes—maybe more, but who’s crazy
enough to put a slash in your arm to see if you can heal it?
Why not? Energy is matter, and vice versa, and if you can control energy through your mind, theoretically the rest follows. How far, I hadn’t figured, not beyond what I could do.
Once in a great while, Loragerd and I got together, but the spontaneity we had enjoyed as younger Guards remained in the past, and we drifted apart on the gentle waves of the present.
Heimdall no longer assigned me missions—he suggested them, perhaps because the Tribunes very quietly gave me the silver star of a Senior Guard, and because they disassociated Maintenance from Assignments.
I let Brendan, Narcissus, and Elene do most of the day-to-day work, and Brendan had another trainee or two he was working into Maintenance. I tried to dig more into theory, both through the Archives and through some field research on the side—sometimes on Weindre and sometimes on uptime Terra, except that Terra was still so unreal that staying there very long gave me headaches. Along with the engineering and physics theories, I looked more into history. Most of the history in the Archives was crisp and gory. Reading between the lines, I gained the impression that the Guard had made more than its share of blunders, at least in the earlier days.
I hadn’t realized that world deaths or total depopulations happened so often, although I certainly wasn’t one to make judgments along those lines.
If some idiot decided core-tapping was a good way to get heavy metals and energy, and miscalculated, and pieces of real estate went flying all over creation, messing up orbits and incidentally ripping up any time-diver who was caught unaware—that was one thing. It may have been a tragedy, a disaster, but the planetary cultures did it to themselves.
If the Guard saw something like that developing, and thought the culture valuable, the Tribunes sometimes tried to head it off. But the Guard could fail. That happened when Eranas, then a Senior Guard, was tracking the Nepturian Civil War.
He didn’t get to the right people and place quite in time, and someone dropped a hell-blaster down a core-tap. Now, when a planet comes apart, it bends time in a way that’s difficult, if not impossible, to put back together. With planets, like Guards, dead is generally dead. There may be a way around it, but we haven’t found it.
I really didn’t have too many second thoughts about the sharks—only about other innocent races that got zapped years before the sharks would have gotten them. But Gurlenis was another question.
Giron had fetched me up to Assignments for Heimdall. Heimdall never came down to see me, probably just as well for both of us.
“Sammis thought you might like an easy assignment, for once,” Heimdall announced.
“There must be a catch.”
“No catch … none whatsoever, except it might take some tricky diving,” Heimdall said. “The data is on the end console.”
“What’s the general idea?” I asked before heading over to the console.
“Holo update before a cultural change.”
That translated into getting holo frames of a time/locale just before the Guard meddled. I asked myself what the Gurlenians had done to merit the Guard’s decision to alter their culture, but didn’t verbalize it, since it was doubtless on the briefing console. I walked over to the stool and keyed in.
Gurlenis was an Arm planet, orange sun, long low hills bronzed with grass, cities built with a green glass that held the light for hours past sunset.
Heavy transport was based on a subsurface induction rail network or by solar-powered craft that skimmed the shallow seas. The people who built it all were bipeds, covered with a fine bronze-green fur that streamed behind them in the continuing and gentle winds.
The reason for the mission, and the cultural alteration, was one publication by a scholar. The professor, although the Gurlenian term more accurately translated as “knowledge-intuiter,” had presented a rather scholarly paper on a unified time theory.
Corbell, the head of Archives, evaluated the contents and predicted, based on the data bank’s analyses, that the probability of the Gurlenians developing time-diving abilities approached unity, given further development. In short, like the sharks, the Gurlenians would challenge the Guard’s monopoly of Time. But since the Gurlenians were peaceful, so to speak, and the occurrence a one-of-a-kind thing, a minor alteration was recommended, if possible.
Zealor had been assigned the job. All I had to do was record the last moments of the existing culture, the moment of passage, and the results.
I’d never stood in the middle of a time-change before, but based on past practice, it wouldn’t affect me—so long as the planet stayed put, and I did a little checking on that to make sure exactly what sort of alteration Zealor had in mind and when.
All he intended to do was move one native where he wouldn’t meet another, thus ensuring that the professor never got born. As changes go, it sounded mild, and I got the coordinates down and headed to Special Stores to pick up the recording equipment.
Halcyon was an assistant supervisor at Special Stores, and I thought Athene relied on her more than on any of the earlier assistants. Like
Loragerd, she’d been a trainee with me, but she’d never developed much beyond rote time-diving. She could dive anywhere she’d been taken, but couldn’t strike out on her own, even with detailed instructions.
I guessed that Baldur had gotten to all of us in that group of trainees, though I would have been hard-pressed to explain it. Halcyon had taken special care to update the equipment they supplied, and that was important, not so much to me, but to the others.
If something failed a crack diver, he or she could usually get back and get it replaced or repaired. But then I could dive while falling through the air. Most divers have to have a momentarily stable platform. Anyway, Athene was lucky to have Halcyon.
She was waiting. “Nicodemus said you’d be the one, and that you’d been in a hurry.” She handed me a set of what appeared to be goggles. “Try these.”
The gadgets had a thin cable that led to a belt pack. I struggled to make the goggles fit, but with them in place, I couldn’t see.
“Silly,” she murmured. “You wear them above your eyes.”
Halcyon had long, fine, blond hair, green eyes so dark they verged on black, and clear tanned skin. Her voice tended to break slightly when she was amused, and she giggled—even after all the years.
“Why?”
“To get the best spacing for an eyewitness view.”
It made sense. You need depth with holos, and the sight perspective is the easiest to watch for long periods of time.
“Remember—try not to jerk your head around. Make long slow movements.”
I nodded, strapped on the belt pack, and headed for the Travel Hall and Gurlenis to make the last record there might be of a culture before Zealor reoriented it.
The Hall had a few Guards popping in and out, but the far end was clear, and I strapped on gauntlets and equipment, not that I thought I’d need them. I dived toward Gurlenis, only a shallow trip because I was almost heading for the now.
I didn’t follow the timepaths, but skipped branches and intuited my way to the destination. Only a few Guards tried straight shots. The rest used the equipment, popping into the now to reorient themselves along the way—at least for longer dives.
Breakout on Gurlenis found me hovering over bronzed hills bathed in light from the orange sun. Late afternoon, I guessed, and the readouts confirmed that the local season was late summer.
Picking a low hill above the nearest city, I made sure the holo “goggles” were in place, and made a series of short split entries down to the
empty hilltop. There I panned the valley and ended with a view of the green glass city at the other end of the grassy lands that filled the valley.
It probably almost looked like flying, and I grinned as I thought of Heimdall watching it. After I finished on the hilltop, I cut out the holo and slid undertime toward the city, ducked into the shadows, and reset the holopak.
From outside the tall evergreens that edged the city, I could see that the place was a town, rather than a full city, and laid out in a definite plan.
The first close-up I caught with the equipment showed three youngsters playing on a triangular grass court of some sort. On each corner of the playing surface stood a tall pole with a balanced crossbar and three metallic rings of various sizes.
Apparently, the idea was to throw an oblong object through the rings in some predetermined order. The crossbar was vaned and changed position with the breeze, moving with minimal changes in wind direction or velocity.
I watched.
The smallest youngster, and I guessed he or she or it was young because of the size differential and an air, a feeling, that I associated with growing up, moved toward one of the corner standards in a hop, step, step, step, hop pattern.
The other two tried to block the advance by anticipating where the patterned zigzag would lead and setting themselves in a blocking stature. No physical contact took place, and it was more like a dance. A couple of body lengths out from the corner standard, the one carrying the oblong made a double hop and tossed it toward the standard. I thought the crossbar swung before the toss was completed. The vanes fluttered, but the light steady breeze hadn’t changed.
The oblong tumbled through the middle ring and was recovered by the tallest, who began moving toward the corner away from me in another stylized pattern—more of a hop, hop, step, hop, step.
The game, if that’s what it was, seemed strangely noncompetitive, but I wondered about the way the crossbar had moved against the wind. I kept the holo going until I had a representative section of the game.
Then I slipped under the now and toward the more heavily structured center of the town, where a number of incomprehensible activities were taking place. I could tell that some of them were commercial transactions, and some seemed social. All the Gurlenians I saw and caught on the holo radiated an impression of purposefulness, but the town was quiet, much quieter than I expected, even considering the attitude of gentleness I had begun to associate with the bronze-furred people.
I recorded everything I could, gazing from unobserved corners, sometimes doing split entries on ceilings to get the best possible view.
The town stood on a low plateau, and from the gradual slope down and into the cropped and cultivated spaces below, it was obvious that the Gurlenians planned their environment carefully. The town center was linked and intertwined with grassy paths. The more heavily traveled routes were paved with a soft green pebbled pavement that gave underfoot.
Not a single garish display showed anywhere, although some of the buildings were labeled with distinctive script, which I couldn’t read.
Even as I watched and recorded, kept cranking away, I noticed that the number of Gurlenians out and about was shrinking. Strange, I thought, because with their wide eyes and cupped ears and lithe bearing I would have suspected them to be at ease at night, even a nocturnal race.
I flicked in and out of the undertime, flashing though the corners of the city, trying to pinpoint activity. As I slid from place to place, something began to nag at me.
As I stopped to holo a scene of the Gurlenians filing into a central structure, I recognized the feeling, or rather the absence of a feeling. Fear—the Gurlenians, or the ones I was watching, didn’t demonstrate any signs of it. In most cultures, somewhere, someplace, there is an aura of fear. Even on Query it exists, and certainly within the Guard, but not where I looked on Gurlenis, it didn’t.
Not a single Gurlenian had looked around as I popped in and out of time to record scenes for posterity. Most races are at least subliminally aware of surveillance—or, like the sharks, violently aware. Either the Gurlenians weren’t aware, or it didn’t bother them.
I shelved that analysis as I began to take stock of the number of graceful souls gliding into the building I was observing. My first thought was a government or town meeting. My second was a religious observance, but I wasn’t sure either fit.
Item: The city was six-sided.
Item: The only six-sided building in the town was the one where the Gurlenians were gathering.
Item: The six sides of the building were parallel to the town boundaries.
Item: Both the grounds of the building and the boundaries of the town were delineated with trimmed coniferlike trees.
Item: The temple was in the exact center of the town, and I could have drawn a perfectly straight line from each
corner of the building to each corner of the town boundary.
Curiosity cornered the mountain cat. I ducked undertime and slid into the temple. Fuzzy as it was in the undertime, I didn’t want to break out inside a wall or a heat source. Those hurt.