“Fifty?” I blurted.
“Even a million years ago, not everyone in the Tower was a diver.”
“Do you think divers today have different abilities from the older divers?”
“That’s hard to say. Take the two of us. You can dive a bit farther fore- and backtime than I can. Not much, though. The biggest overt difference is that you can dive to and from a wider range of environments and lug a lot more mass with you. Of course, as we both know, you can do more than that, not that I’m terribly surprised. Diving is a matter of mental control over both energy and matter, and it was probably only a matter of time before someone showed up who could. Good genes help, though.”
I had trouble not choking on my Terran steak. Here Sammis was politely telling me he knew about my ability to handle thunderbolts without gauntlets, just as if it were common knowledge.
“Have you talked about this,” I stumbled through the words, “with … ah … anyone … ?”
Sammis snorted. “Give me a little credit, Loki. Even if anyone believed me and didn’t think that old Sammis had finally lost it, why would I want to give Heimdall or the Tribunes another reason to worry about you?”
I chewed on the steak, digesting the implications of his words. Then I tried another tack. “Am I just late discovering it, or have people always been plotting and checking up on each other—in the Guard, I mean?”
Sammis actually sighed and put down the light beer he had been sipping. “People of any species have been plotting in any organization ever put together, so far as I’ve been able to discover. What happens in the Guard is generally more subtle and long-range, because nobody really wants to go to Hell, and because most troublemakers and revolutionaries either bite off too much as divers or give up and disappear.”
For some reason, I thought of Wryan. “Did Wryan bite off too much?”
He sighed again. “Loki … yes, she … yes.”
“Sorry.” I took a sip of firejuice. “The other big question I had, one of them, was about the Guard. Why do I get the impression that the Guard is getting weaker and tearing down other civilizations because it fears them, when all the statistics show that it’s actually stronger?”
“If I were being cruel, I’d tell you to wait a few centuries. Or that impatience was the problem with Orpheus, or that it takes gods longer to understand mere human thought.” Sammis stroked his chin for a moment. “But that would only tell you I was playing games, or trying to manipulate you.” He paused. “How about this? The bigger and stronger an organization becomes, the more it has, and the more it has
to lose. The more it has to lose, the more it fears anything that could challenge it. The early Guard was too busy just trying to keep people alive right then to worry about potential future challenges.”
I didn’t like the answer, even if it squared with some of my thoughts. Would the same thing happen to Query as the sharks? Did it have to? Could I do anything? What?
“Do you think that other peoples besides us should travel the stars?”
He laughed. “Does it matter what I think? Others have, and some still do—just not in our corner of the galaxy.”
That bothered me, but I wasn’t quite sure why. I didn’t want more sharks running around, but was the Guard the best entity to make that judgment?
I had a last question. “What happened to Baldur?”
“He disappeared, voluntarily, from everything I know.”
“But where would he go? And why?”
Sammis smiled sadly. “Did anyone besides you really listen to him? Does anyone listen to you because of the value of your words? Or do they listen because you’re so powerful that they’re frightened to death of displeasing you?”
“Frightened of me?”
Sammis snorted for the second time. “Cut the false modesty, Loki. You’re the closest thing to a real god ever invented, and you’re the Guard’s creation. They destroy you, and they make the Guard a farce. Besides, now it would be rather difficult.”
“I damn near died on Hell—and getting back from the shark cluster.”
Sammis smiled. “They needed you to stop Heimdall, and the sharks, and now you’re a worse threat to them than either. That’s the problem when you create heroes and gods.”
I shook my head. I had been set up to stop Heimdall?
“You didn’t think it was an accident that Heimdall was allowed to foist that gauntlet off on you? Or that Freyda was right there?”
I swallowed, hard.
“But Heimdall and Freyda seem more friendly now …”
Sammis had finished both his beer and his meal. “Of course. Times change, and he’s no longer the greatest threat to the Tribunes.”
We talked a bit longer, but Sammis had said all he was going to say, and just talked pleasantries.
After the meal, I went back to Maintenance, and I presumed he went back to Assignments.
A lot of people clearly thought I was dense for not seeing what was obvious, but I saw plenty. Seeing wasn’t my problem … Heimdall’s schemes to become a Tribune, Freyda’s power climbing, Gilmesh’s efforts
to weaken Frey, and Corbell’s use of analyses from the Archives to ensure his indispensability. What I had problems with was believing … how could so many people talk about the good of Query, and the good of the Guard, and then act in ways basically immoral or destructive just to be a little higher, just to get a star with silver edges instead of gold edges?
Hell, I had destroyed peoples—the sharks anyway—but I did it because I thought they were deadly to the rest of the galaxy. Maybe I’d been wrong … maybe not … but I hadn’t been doing it to become a Counselor or Tribune.
That still didn’t answer my questions, and I wanted to double-check what Sammis had intimated. So I went back to the Archives. This time I used Heimdall’s codes.
I’d decided on exactly what I wanted, and that was a printout of twenty cultures within the last million years that could be shifted up to high-tech or cultures which had been high-tech and reduced by the Guard’s meddling. To that, I added the criterion of possible development of interstellar travel in some form or another.
The data banks balked at the additional condition, ending up with some garbage that scripted, “No basis for evaluating particular isolated technological phenomena.”
That might make it harder for me to go ahead with my half-formed plans to end the monopoly on the stars—or at least to see if it was a good idea—but I got a list of times/cultures, plus a smaller list of low-tech planets that offered long-shot possibilities and empty planets suitable for some types of colonization.
The three lists might cover all the possibilities. For all the ideas I had, I had a growing feeling that I wasn’t going to have the time to develop them.
Still … twenty-plus cultures that should be out among the stars … and weren’t. Ten that had been pulled out of time or star travel by the Guard—and the precedent I had set in destroying a whole cluster. As I saw it, the trends were becoming critical.
THINKING ABOUT THE best way to throw a monkey wrench in the machine led me to study the aftereffects. I didn’t want to get caught in the act—or afterward.
That was the basic reason why the Guard had such a hold on Query.
Domestic Affairs/Locator could track any Queryan through the Locator tags planted in our shoulders at birth. They weren’t mandatory, but most parents opted for them, simply because they could see the necessity—how could they find a place-lost child without them? As it was, despite the Locator equipment, we still lost a few every year.
The exact composition of the tags was a closely held secret, supposedly only known by the Tribunes. I doubted that, but it was closely held enough that there were no records in the Archives or anywhere else that I could find.
Not that I intended to let that stop me. I had the equipment necessary, and the lack of interest in things mechanical among most Guards had to work in my favor. Who would consider a mechanical solution, or understand one as I worked it out?
Except for a few in Domestic Affairs and Assignments, or maybe Special Stores, most of the Guard were fumble-fingers when it came to technology. Use it, break it, and ask Maintenance to fix it, or duplicate it and don’t tell anyone—that was the operating philosophy. Most of those who really understood the technology were mine, like Brendan, Elene, and Narcissus. All Brendan lacked was a bit of self-confidence, and that was coming.
Narcissus was so proud of his profile or face-on image that I sometimes thought he’d polish stuff to a fine gloss just to see his reflection. Never mind if it worked—just get it to shine. If I let him admire himself long enough, he worked with a will. Barely passed his diving test, though.
Through it all and despite the abysmal level of technical understanding in the Guard, Maintenance was holding up its end, with all of Heimdall’s efforts to pour repairs at us.
Heimdall, in his spotless black, delighted in seeing me with greasy hands or in a messed jumpsuit. I was always the sort of technician who couldn’t paint or repair anything without picking up every stray bit of paint, grease, and general grime. The work product was spotless, but I never was.
To deal with the Locator system, I needed an analysis of a functioning tag. That was the priority, and I got down to it.
Setting up the heavy equipment scanner to pick up my own Locator tag was the hard part, but I managed it by shorting out a safety access circuit and removing one wall from the inspection chamber. Then I had to design a special shield to screen everything but the square of my shoulder blade where the tag was embedded.
I rechecked the circuitry to make sure it would only take a flash scan, then chewed my fingernails a bit farther.
Why didn’t I get the parameters from the Locator section?
The Locator signals are sealed, automatic, and the parameters are limited to the Tribunes. While Locator can track the signals of any Queryan with a Locator tag, the composition of the signals is secret.
Why didn’t I take a blank tag from the maternity ward and analyze it? I did—and found out that the signal is a twisted helix, so to speak, and combined the basic temporal Locator signal with the individual aura and sent it back in a scrambled pattern. The combination was set at random by the master Locator computer by remote after the implantation at birth, and once set, remained set—forever. That immutability might work in my favor, provided no one found out what I was doing.
Not that anyone who would understand my actions was likely to be wandering down into Maintenance. Both Freyda and Heimdall were happier to see me repairing, analyzing, or traipsing around the galaxy than thinking.
Repair facilities, even ones like the Guard’s, with the sophisticated air and light scrubbers, with superclean technology, microcircuit duplicators, and the rest, still have that atmosphere or edge of grubbiness that no amount of cleaning can totally remove. In the Maintenance Hall, it wasn’t so apparent at first, but after years I became aware of it, more of a feeling associated with technology than anything else.
A light meter would tell me that the Hall was as clean as Assignments, but the floor-to-ceiling slow-glass panels seemed dimmer. The air had a faint tinge of something—ozone, graphite, oil, heated metal—that no other section of the Tower had. The rows and rows of equipment that I had reorganized, some of it under time protection and unused for centuries, added to the impression of raw mechanical power.
I tried to picture a time when the Guard had employed all the equipment, but failed. Some of the bulkier pieces dated to cultures no longer accessible, a few back to the time of the Frost Giant/Twilight Wars, sleeping under their time-protectors, shining as brightly as they had two million years before when they had turned out fire swords and rain shields. I laughed softly, as I caught myself lapsing into belief and repetition of the legend which Wryan and Sammis had said was untrue. According to them, the equipment had been gathered, but most of it had never been used.
According to the myth, that had been the first, last, and only pitched battle fought by the Guard. I found it hard to understand how they could all coast through twenty thousand centuries on the memory of one war—particularly when it hadn’t been all that glorious.
I cut off the dreams and historical analysis, knowing I was only postponing
sticking myself under the modified analyzer because it was going to hurt.
With a deep breath, I pushed my not quite totally shielded shoulder under the beam head and punched the stud. After I had wiped the blood from my chin and slapped some heal paste on the lip I had bitten through, I checked the analyzer data. There was enough, for which I was glad. I wasn’t certain I could have gotten through it another time.
I managed to smear some more of the paste on the burned shoulder and to cover the burn with a sterile field dressing in order to slip my jumpsuit back on. I knew the wound was sterile, but the pain marched across my shoulder like a shark army might have. Then I tried to concentrate on having the muscles and skin heal. I thought the pain lessened, but that could have been wishful thinking.
Sitting down on the operator’s stool, I put the circuitry back in its normal patterns, although I doubted that anyone would have tried to use the equipment or figure out why it had been changed. Still—Narcissus was just curious enough to poke his nose or fingers in the wrong place, and the last thing I needed was for him to get burned. With my luck, Heimdall would have started asking questions.
I kept thinking of the Guard as an enormous clock, designed for eternity, but ever so slowly wearing down, missing an instant here, counting two units instead of one there, while the clockmaker’s children and grandchildren kept oiling it and polishing it, afraid to tinker or replace any of the fine pieces within.
I knew the Archives data said the Guard was growing, but I found it hard to believe the numbers. Even so, greater numbers of more talented Guards didn’t necessarily mean a better Guard.
I debated leaving for the Aerie to let the shoulder recover, but decided not to wait. I walked back to my spaces and fed the data into the master analyzer. One tape had my own aura recordings; one had the data from the blank Locator tag, and the last had information from my own tag.
The console screen seemed blank forever, though it was only several units before a complicated formula appeared. I made several recordings of the formula and tucked it away under several dummy files in my system, plus two copies on data blocs that I tucked into my belt. I pulled my heavy red cloak over my jumpsuit.
The next day would be the most risky, I figured.
Then I walked up the ramps to the South Portal, still concentrating on trying to heal my lip and shoulder.
For some reason—Heimdall’s displeasure with me, my own introspectiveness, my reputation for not suffering technological idiots, or the
rumor that I didn’t need gauntlets to throw thunderbolts—few of the Guards struck up conversations with me within the Tower itself.
I was the only Guard in centuries to openly oppose and injure a Counselor, go to Hell, and return. For similar reasons, I suspected, Heimdall also had few conversations. After all, he had attempted murder and gotten away with it with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Heimdall led a lonely life, both public and private. The born-again Glammis found him too cold and had turned away, finally leaving the Guard.
In that late afternoon, as I walked through the echoing and near-empty corridors, glancing at holos of past glories standing out from the main walls, feeling the warmth and light of the slow-glass panels from a thousand suns, I wanted the silence, trying not to strain or bite my lip at the combined pain and itching from my shoulder.
“Loki?” called a light voice. Verdis had left Personnel for the day apparently, and waited by the South Portal.
She tossed her mahogany hair back over her shoulder. Usually, she expressed her feelings with her entire body, but now her eyes were filled with concern. The rest of her body might as well not have been there, and that bothered me.
“Hera’s Inn?” she asked.
I wanted to go anywhere like I wanted to dive through a black hole, but Verdis was up to something, and my gut instincts told me that refusal was not a good idea.
Verdis was well regarded, and now that Gilmesh, Heimdall, and Freyda were closer than ever, she could easily start inquiries with the newest Tribune. She might also have some news about what Freyda was up to.
Freyda and I had long since cooled on each other, but I liked to think that a fondness remained. Not that Freyda would hesitate a moment to consign me to Hell or worse if she thought I were a danger to the Guard.
“I’ll be just an instant. Meet you there.” I nodded to Verdis and slid, not to the Inn, but the Aerie. A quarter way around Query, the sun was low, almost dropping behind the peaks, and the light glittered off Seneschal.
I staggered over to the mirror and stripped off my jumpsuit and dressing. The dressing burned as it came off, but already the deep burn looked more like a combination of old bruise and scab. Still, I put on more heal paste and a clean dressing. It still hurt, stabbing into the shoulder.
Maybe it had been a stupid thing to use an equipment analyzer, but a standard tissue analyzer wouldn’t have been equipped with the necessary
energy scanning levels. More important, the medical equipment was more closely monitored by the Tribunes.
I washed my face, spent another few units taking care of bodily necessities, and arrived at Hera’s Inn to face Verdis’s scowl.
“You took long enough.”
“Sorry,” I apologized, and she nodded, relaxing slightly.
Inns were peculiar to Guard and Queryan life—at least our kind of inns. In the first place, the doors and inner walls were time-twisted, which limited entry to better than average planet-sliders—although a diver who could barely pass the Test could struggle through. The decor was usually some variety of technological sword and sorcery, with holos and displays from the more spectacular planets visited by the Guard.
Hera had been a fair diver, but had retired into a quieter way of life, if the hustle and bustle of running an inn could be termed quieter. She was plump, the closest thing to a fat diver or ex-diver I’d ever seen, with brassy blond hair she swore—and could she swear—was natural.
Her inn was done in wood—real wood—mostly polished cedar from a place called Lebanon on Terra. Must have taken a good-sized forest, just from the expanse of the inn, and a lot of divers to bring it all back—either that or a few planks and the biggest duplicator I’d ever heard of. With her connections, either was possible.
The floors were blue glowstones, also unusual, and the illumination was provided by light-torches from Olympus.
Inns wouldn’t have been possible without a sharing based on a sense of honor. Hera or any innkeeper left a list of items she needed on a tablet by the door. Guards brought them back as they saw fit. Haphazard as it was, it worked. The inns not favored perished or were taken over by more congenial proprietors.
Power came from the ubiquitous Murian fusactor, and Hera’s synthesizers, adaptations of the duplicator really, would copy the master dishes in the Dies—really just energy patterns stored in lattices similar to those that supported the data banks of the Archives.
Verdis claimed a corner booth as I followed her, although all booths were essentially corner booths. I sat down gingerly to ensure I didn’t hit my tender shoulder.
Verdis offered a smile that didn’t quite make it. Mine was about as genuine as hers.
She cleared her throat, and I waited.
“Loki, you’ve spent years now, since you were in Hell, aloof from almost anyone …”
“Me? Charming Loki? Aloof?”
“That’s what I mean.” She shook her head. “I’m hungry, and I don’t
think well on an empty stomach.” She rose and headed for the synthesizers.
It sounded like a good idea, but I winced when I bumped my shoulder. No one saw. I got a Weindrian flameray, and Verdis got something smothered in cheese.
Mine took longer for the synthesizer to deliver, and Verdis was sipping a glass of Atlantean Firesong when I eased back into my side of the booth.