Frey was in, toying with his black light saber, obviously bored. His boredom could be laid at Tyron’s and Ferrin’s arches. Neither could dive worth a damn, but Tyron handled Domestic Affairs and Ferrin effectively ran Locator. Together they did their work and Frey’s, which was good because Frey probably would have made a botch of it. Still, Frey was technically the effective chief constable of Query by virtue of being the supervisor of Domestic Affairs/Locator.
Since Frey was alone, I ambled in.
“Got an instant?”
“Infinity and some,” he flipped back as he sheathed the light saber and sat up straight in the work stool.
“Why don’t we put some trainees into Domestic Affairs earlier in training?” I asked. “They’d understand how the system works better, and the real role of the Guard in holding Query together would be clearer.”
I edged toward his console.
He leaned forward and put both elbows on the table, crowding me back and away from the console screen.
“Loki, the system’s worked fine for umpteen hundred centuries. Let’s not meddle with a good thing.”
“We lose a lot of trainees who opt out for the admin obligation.”
“No guts,” snorted Frey.
I circled around to the other side of the table and leaned against a heavy wooden case with no apparent function to account for its presence.
“At ten trainees a year or less, we’re not exactly burning up this corner of the galaxy—or replacing the giants of the past, like Ragnorak or Odin Thor.”
“With Guards like you,” laughed Frey, “who needs the past? But then, with more Guards like you, the future wouldn’t have a past.”
He chuckled so thoroughly I almost felt like stuffing his light saber straight down his throat. I didn’t, instead slipping between him and his console as he reared back howling over his joke. It wasn’t that funny, but I smiled and slapped the snoop in place.
“ … future wouldn’t have a past …” He chuckled again.
“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But that makes an argument for more other kinds of Guards, doesn’t it? Anyway … think about it, would you?”
“I’ll talk it over with Heimdall.”
He’d talk anything over with Heimdall if it involved thought or words of more than two syllables.
I bowed ever so slightly as I left and wandered back to Maintenance.
The days drifted by quietly, like the eye of a storm on Faffnir, and I knew a storm was swirling around unseen, but the more certain I was that something had to happen, the less that did.
After a couple of ten-days, I redonned my costume imitation of Frey and picked up all my snoops.
To get the one from Frey’s console was harder, but not impossible. I waited until he left one afternoon, then barged in and dropped a report on the status of repairs on his table, picking up the snoop along the way.
When I inspected the snoops, I discovered that not one had been damaged, tampered with, or even touched. Such miraculous disregard alerted my cautionary feelings. Either I was way off base, or I was missing something, maybe a lot. But what?
With no answer apparent, I began to run out the scans from the snoops, tedious enough to keep me occupied for a while between repairs, since I had to study each frame under the magnifiers of the miniwaldo setup.
In the end, though, I identified the personal codes for Frey, Heimdall, Nicodemus, Verdis, Gilmesh, Athene, Loragerd, Halcyon, Ferrin, and a few trainees. The biggest problem wasn’t getting the codes, but identifying which code belonged to whom.
I’d placed all the snoops with decent focus on the console keyboards, but they were so small that the peripheral scan was tight. Some of the
codes were simple enough. HML-10 had to be Heimdall, and FRY-27 had to be Frey. But who was XXF-13? And which Tribune—if it were a Tribune—was TRB-002?
I supposed identifying them all didn’t really matter, since my goal was to get enough to use them for specific data requests. I also had to assume that the Archives could track the console from which data was requested, and that meant I had to use other consoles—or one of the research consoles in the Archives. They were secluded enough, for the most part.
After making that decision, I stood and started to leave for some refreshment.
Brendan caught me.
“What do you need?”
“I’m having trouble with a generator, and the schematics all check. But it won’t run. Could you take a look?”
“Be right there.” I tucked the code list into my pocket and followed him back to his space.
He brightly expected me to put it all to rights, even though he could do it himself, I was convinced.
“You can see. I’ve replaced all the fused circuits, rerouted the control lines … matched all of it …”
At first glance nothing seemed wrong, and I could understand his frustration. Nothing more upsetting than to work your tail off and not be able to get something to work that should. If all the circuits were correct, and I assumed for a moment that they were, what could be wrong?
I began to chuckle, not nastily, but almost sympathetically.
“Brendan … think about it … What’s the first thing you do when you repair a generator?”
“Remove the …” He blushed.
“I’m not laughing at you, but you went to all this work, and you thought you’d made this terrible and intricate mistake. You didn’t. Nothing works without fuel.”
The generator worked. Brendan was torn between embarrassment and pride. Embarrassment because he’d forgotten to reopen the water intake, and pride because he’d basically rebuilt the generator from scratch.
“Good job,” I told him. “Don’t make a big deal about the intake. It’s just the sort of thing we’ve all done at one time or another.”
I thought about it as I munched a small pastry. You could go through the most complicated procedures and forget the simplest and most vital things. Why did I want to find critical turning points in other cultures? Did the answer lie in high-tech cultures that might impinge on Query?
Would finding out how many cultures we’d exterminated really tell me anything I didn’t know?
That night, in my high and secure Aerie, as I watched the dark canyons, everything seemed so small. There I was, perched behind permaglass over the depths of needle-thin canyons, with the bottoms so far below that two cloud layers often obscured the river that twisted its way under my roost. And I felt cramped.
I could walk the air between the peaks, catch thunderbolts from the skies and throw them without gauntlets, heal small scratches by looking at them—but I felt cramped. Had Baldur felt that way after all the years?
Heimdall was continuing to build a private group of thugs, and even after they’d tried to kill me on Hell, I’d done nothing. Gilmesh was plotting through Kranos, it seemed, against Heimdall, yet no one said anything. The Tribunes had a hidden time-linked table of some sort and told no one. A fake Frey wandered the Tower, and nothing happened.
And some things didn’t fit at all. I mean, with a long-lived culture, I could see the need for or at least the rationale behind long, slow plots, but why had I been sent out to make the holo record of Gurlenis? That was a job for a junior Guard—or was it?
And Baldur, his insistence on getting the Sinopol generator, not all that long before he disappeared—with both generators. What was he doing with them?
Even the sharks. Why had the Tribunes pushed for my destroying the sharks—it would have been millions, of years before they reached Query. The only place they were really close to was Terra.
Was the Guard winding down, like the mechanical toy I thought it was? Or was I seeing what I wanted to see? Or was someone else showing me what they wanted me to see?
I went to sleep without any real answers. Morning’s arrival didn’t provide them either.
Deciding more information was necessary, and hating myself for thinking so, I ate and slid to the Tower. Baseline data came first, and I spent a portion of the morning—after I’d tackled a small atmospheric generator for a weather satellite, and gone over the remaining repairs with Brendan, Narcissus, and Elene—in one of the Archives’ shielded booths.
I plugged in Nicodemus’s code.
“Has the number of trainees per century increased or decreased in the past million years?”
“Increased.” The figures followed. Summed up, the Archives’ data
indicated that prior to 1,000,000. A.T. the average number of trainees per century completing the first two years of training was 300. The current moving average was 530.
I tried another tack. “Has the time-diving ability of the average trainee decreased over the period?”
“Negative … Subjective analysis of performance reports indicates significant improvement.”
I sat back in the padded stool. I’d spent thirty-plus years figuring the Guard was on the way out, and the damned data banks were saying the opposite. I assumed that the business of tearing down high-tech cultures was to eliminate challenges to an ever-weakening Query.
If the Guard and Query were stronger, why the increased destruction? Just because we could do it? Would we end up just like the sharks? Or was data being falsified?
I asked another question.
“What is the current number of active Temporal Guards? Of all currently living Guards and former Guards?”
The Guard, including trainees, numbered 4,156, with approximately a half million current and former living Guards and trainees.
A half a million? I couldn’t believe that. Where were they? I asked about former Guards.
There were 480,000 residing on Query and 5,000 on Sertis. Statistical probabilities indicated that 15,000 resided elsewhere.
I was convinced the numbers didn’t match. An average of four hundred new Guards a century over a million years totaled four million. Guards were supposedly immortal. So what happened to three and a half million Guards? I was dumb enough to ask that one.
“Inquiry included trainees. Sixty percent of all trainees select administrative option. Guard mortality/disappearance averages twenty-eight percent.”
One in four Guards died or disappeared? Even if it were true, the numbers still didn’t make sense. That meant twenty percent of Query’s population had basic Guard training and experience. And they just went along? Or did they?
I canceled out, asked for a total erasure, and walked back down to Maintenance.
The Guard was bigger than it used to be? Why did we all rattle around in the Tower? Who could answer the questions? My father would have been happy to—except I had no idea where in the galaxy he might be.
What about my own experiences? When I had started in Maintenance, there had been Glammis and Baldur. Now I was there, with
Brendan, Elene, and Narcissus, and we were slated to get one of the current trainees, Dercia.
I slammed my fist on the worktable so hard the slap echoed off the walls.
Both Brendan and Narcissus were there before I knew it.
“Are you all right?”
“What’s wrong?”
Elene just stood behind them and waited.
I grinned, hard as it was. “Nothing. Just amazed at my own stupidity.”
They exchanged looks. Brendan shrugged at Narcissus, who smiled back at Brendan. Elene nodded.
“If there’s anything we can do,” said Brendan, “let us know.”
They were gone. Too bad the entire Guard wasn’t like them.
I’d tried to pass on Baldur’s understanding and appreciation of the mechanical basis of cultures, but wasn’t sure I’d gotten it across to them or any of the trainees I’d lectured. Compared to old silken-tongued Heimdall or smooth Gilmesh, my halting lectures were probably as dry as centuries-old dust.
The only other person who could and might answer my questions was Sammis, and it was time to look him up, if I could find him.
Not so strangely, he was in the first place I looked, in the corner of the Assignments Hall. When he wasn’t diving, that was usually where he was, often using a console. Why he spent so much time there, I couldn’t understand. He and Heimdall had little enough in common, but Heimdall did seem to listen when Sammis made a suggestion.
“Loratini’s, Loki?” he asked before I could more than open my mouth.
Back we went to Loratini’s, the inn overlooking the Falls. Didn’t seem right without Wryan, but Sammis didn’t say anything. I decided not to raise that one.
Sammis picked out his food even before we sat down at one of the individual balcony tables. I followed his example.
“It still has the best food,” he said, “or the best templates in the synthesizers.”
I nodded as I put down my beaker of firejuice.
“What’s on your mind?”
I swallowed and asked, “How big was the Guard when it started?”
He grinned momentarily. “You’re assuming that I know a lot. No one kept detailed records that far back. If I had to guess, I’d say there were perhaps a thousand in the original Guard—but only about fifty were timedivers.”