I located an open space away from the assembling group and broke out, ready to dive, if necessary.
Face-to-face with me was a Gurlenian—an older one with white-streaked and flowing body hair and a mantle of age wrapped around his very being.
The old Gurlenian looked at me, not at all surprised, bowed slightly, made some cryptic motion in the air with a single sweeping gesture, and waited.
I stayed where I was, tense, taking it all in.
And after that gesture, I received a feeling of peacefulness, and that was the only way I could describe it.
I nodded back, and slid undertime to a darker corner of the meeting hall between where two beams met in the ceiling. I kept the holo running.
A slight shiver shook the undertime, and the hall wavered, and it seemed to me that there were slightly fewer Gurlenians, and that those who were left no longer sat in chairs.
Instead, row after row of Gurlenians sat on wide and flat cushions, equally spaced from each other. The entire hall was dead silent, yet filled with that same feeling of peace that I had received from the old Gurlenian.
What had happened? I could feel the whisper of a change wind, but little had changed. I swallowed, and ducked undertime, sliding higher into the sky before breaking out.
There were definite differences. The town was still six-sided but smaller. The hills looked wilder, with fewer trees, but the place felt the same.
I shivered. The Gurlenian mind was attuned to time, and someone else besides the professor in the briefing had addressed the time issue, in his absence—or nonexistence. Zealor would know it hadn’t worked, just as I had. If Zealor’s simple alteration didn’t work, what would he try next? Should I leave?
For whatever reason, I decided against it. Instead, I panned the town and the surroundings before dropping back to the beams in the temple, at least for another few moments.
As I recorded what I felt would be the last moments of that unique
culture, my thoughts kept drifting. Why was I the one with the holopak? No specialist was I, not speaking the language, not even having been sent for a Linguistics briefing. It didn’t make sense.
Sammis thought I’d like an easy assignment, and Heimdall had given it to me. Why?
I didn’t have time for more reflection, because the cold wind of time-change blew, creeping up my spine like the paralysis that followed the sting of a rocksucker.
Like a picture seen through falling water in the twilight, the temple melted around me. The town evaporated in mist, and the Gurlenians dressed only in their golden, fine-flowing hair who had been seated within body lengths of me instants before became smoke, and then less than the memory of smoke—and were gone.
The chill of the time-change winds howled past me and barked its way down the trail to the future. I slid to a rocky outcrop and gazed out over sparsely vegetated hills and wild grasses. A few scraggly bushes had replaced the cultured and trimmed conifers.
With the abrupt drop in temperature, I shivered.
Some animal howled in the distance.
No more Gurlenians. They were gone, for good, and I could feel it. That wasn’t quite it. Rather, they and their sense of peace had never been, and Gurlenis was now a wild planet.
I hit the stud on the belt pack to stop the holos, lifted the goggles, and dropped them into a belt pouch.
I slid back to the Travel Hall. It was deserted.
I stowed my equipment in my own chest, including the holo gear. The equipment would go back to Special Stores in the morning, but the holo frames would go to Assignments, directly to Heimdall’s console, before I left the Tower.
The Tower itself was generally empty, except for the trainee watch staff, and I could hear my own steps echoing in the silence as I climbed the ramps.
The Assignments Hall was dark, except for Giron, who held the watch console, and the figure at the main console.
“Sammis?”
“I told Heimdall I’d wait for your return. How did it go?”
“Fine, if you care for that sort of thing.” I didn’t much care what I said. Sammis wasn’t likely to repeat it. I might have been more careful if Heimdall had asked, but at that point I might not have been.
He smiled, I’d have to have said sadly, and answered, “Sometimes that’s the way it goes.”
I didn’t want to hear more.
I handed him the holo tapes, said good night, and left, wondering about Sammis—why he was there. Was it just that he had nothing better to do with Wryan gone?
After I left the Tower, I slid straight to the Aerie. There I sat on the edge of my cliff in the darkness, warmed by my glowstone floor, sipped firejuice, and saw the eagles circle, far from the Tower, far from Quest—and yet not nearly far enough.
The eradication of the Gurlenians wasn’t going to vanish, no matter how long I stared out the permaglass of the Aerie, no matter how many busted pieces of equipment I fixed, no matter how much I learned about solid-state theory or Terran physics.
And how many others had we wiped clean from the slate of Time? I knew about those that had impinged on me—Gurlenis, the shark cluster—and a few others like Ydris. But how many others had there been?
That answer was in the Assignment files. I didn’t want to go through Nicodemus or Heimdall to find out. The data banks of the Archives probably had most of the same information, maybe more, but the results of my last efforts to access such data, when the entire Guard knew I was trying to find Baldur, indicated that the Tribunes, or Heimdall, or someone was following my every move.
Would they still be looking after all these years? Probably. Patience had to be a virtue learned by the powers-that-be in an immortal society.
Real analytical thinking had been difficult for me, unlike Ferrin or Sammis. If I were Ferrin and wanted to find out information without broadcasting my intentions, how would I do it? That was the question. How did the Tribunes know who accessed data? The last time, they’d simply asked for copies of the requests off my personal code.
As I’d discovered in my brief time in Personnel, and in my own supervisory work in Maintenance, not many cross-checks were used. We didn’t have enough time or people.
Clearly, the simplistic answer was not to use my own code, but another Guard’s. The next question was whose and how to get it.
I tilted my stool back, letting my thoughts ferment, and looked out into the darkness, trying to pick out the shadows of the night eagles, soaring in the blackness. They flew with such little effort, a flap here or there, riding the thermals.
Ask someone? Hardly—that would be the same as announcing it. Whatever I did had to look as though nothing had changed.
How about microsnoops?
I was always working on small stuff at my bench, and, if I could plant them in the course of normal business, who would know? But where?
Suppose I planted one focused on each console screen used by Guards whose codes I wanted?
That sounded simple enough, provided I could get the focus angle wide enough to cover the entire screen and keyboard. And it wouldn’t do to use a Tribune’s code, even if I could get it, since they probably talked to each other.
If I obtained ten codes, or at the fewest, the codes of four or five individuals whose requests for trend data might not seem strange, I might obscure exactly what I was after. My main targets were Heimdall, if for no other reason than to get someone chasing him, Nicodemus, Gilmesh, and Frey for starters. Corbell’s code would be ideal, but too dangerous because he’d likely be one of those checking data requests, and all I needed was for him to find out that he was making requests he hadn’t made.
With that, I ended my plotting for the moment.
The next afternoon, I rounded up the smallest of the microsnoops I’d built to cover my back when I’d gone to Personnel and began redesigning it to shrink it further and use wider-angle lenses. Between repairs, that took almost a ten-day. Then I duplicated fifteen.
I still had to decide on the best way to plant them. Since I couldn’t back- or foretime on Query itself, I had two choices—either to mosey into each of the areas in the coming days and place them in broad daylight, so to speak, or to use the undertime to flash through during periods when the spaces were empty.
The first alternative, while superficially attractive—no sliding around in the dark of night—had a few drawbacks. How was I going to plant a snoop near someone’s personal screen while he or she was using it?
Number two didn’t appear much better. If anyone was naturally suspicious, and a lot of people seemed to be, wouldn’t someone have remote sensing devices—or something to monitor work areas?
When I’d joined the Guard, never would I have considered that the honorable Senior Guards, Counselors, and Tribunes might have snoops in their Halls. While some of them, such as Frey, might not have the ability to find, plant, and use such devices, I had no such doubts about the abilities of others, such as Gilmesh, Freyda, and Heimdall—or Eranas.
Although there were night watches in the Tower, only certain Halls were manned—Locator, Domestic Affairs, and Assignments. The Tribunes had to know that some divers, like Sammis or me, could dive within the Tower, and I couldn’t believe that there weren’t at least holo records being taken of some areas all the time.
So how could I plant snoops without getting caught?
If anything went at all wrong while I attempted to place snoops during working hours, I’d be caught red-handed, and then some. If on the other hand, if I tried a flash through night-slide, I might end up as an image on a holo screen. I wouldn’t be caught immediately—just whenever someone reviewed the records. That wasn’t much help.
What if I didn’t look like me? That was one idea worth pursuing. In most snoops the focus wasn’t too clear, and a general suggestion of someone else might do the trick.
That conclusion led to another series of questions, but in the end only one pseudo-identity made much sense, because he was roughly my size and his mannerisms and especially his outfit were easily counterfeited.
Nightmail is easily procured, even black nightmail, from the deep storerooms. At one time many of the Guards used it. Went to show how much softer things had gotten over the centuries.
While I couldn’t obtain a real light saber, I could duplicate its silhouette and exterior appearance with materials right at my own workbench, and it would even glow. A dark cloak, a big black chain, black high boots, a swagger, and who would know I wasn’t Frey?
That left one screen to get—Prey’s own in Locator/Domestic Affairs. I would have to use the direct approach there. Frey wouldn’t go skulking into his own office.
It was hard not to dash off that afternoon and put it all together, but I refrained, refrained for almost a ten-day, getting each piece of my costume as a part of daily routine, or concealed within it, with no sudden trips to Stores, no odd requests.
The night I picked, the planting went as smoothly as a dive to Vulcan or Haskill. Flick undertime, then out in a shadow, walk to the console and place the snoop, ruffle through papers and drawers, clink the night-mail, and walk away before disappearing in the shadows.
I got snoops into Heimdall’s console, and those of Nicodemus, Ferrin, Tyron, Verdis, Gilmesh, and Athene. I even used the same routine to plant one on my own console.
I slid away from the Tower wearing the outfit and left it in the Aerie. If anyone could track me that far, it didn’t matter—they’d already know. During the whole bit, I avoided going fore- or backtime, because the Locator consoles were programmed to throw out real-time locations on Query.
Later I’d need to retrieve them. I’d opted for self-contained units, since I didn’t want broadcast energy flows running around the Tower—besides, over time, I wasn’t sure how they’d work and how they might be traced. The self-contained types were less likely to be detected, easier
to operate, and had no overt ties to me. The ones I placed looked like rivets, raised plates, screws—that sort of stuff.
The morning after I planted my snoops, my ears were wide open, alert to any change in the pulse or gossip around the Tower, but nothing seemed to have changed.
At least, no one was wandering around asking, “Did you hear that someone was snooping around the Tower last night?”
In some ways, it was an anticlimax.
I buried myself in the little world of Maintenance, worried about divers’ gear, fixed warm suits, power packs, stunners, gauntlets, and even recommended greater use of Baldur’s small fusion generator for a couple of isolated weather remote stations.
Two or three days passed before I could plant a snoop on Frey’s console, and I practically had to pick an argument with him to do it. I didn’t dislike him, not exactly, but if anyone had been granted status beyond ability, that was Frey.
On that morning, I loitered my way past his archway, and if anyone had asked me why I was on that side of the Square and not in Maintenance, I’d have been hard-pressed for an answer that made sense. I always have had trouble in coming up with out-and-out lies.