She ate for a while before she tried again.
“For all your power and fame, you distrust the very people you work for. They distrust you. You bury yourself and the fire that springs from you in that cavern with your machines. When you do emerge, Odin Thor and the Tribunes shake. All the younger Guards worship the glow-stones you walk on, and if you deign to favor them with a word, they feel honored. Everyone always wants to talk to your people, trying to figure out what you might do next. But you never do anything—except improve the machinery of the Guard, occasionally go fight a thunderstorm, and take impossible diving missions.”
“And that all means?” I asked, after swallowing the hot-bitter meat.
“You could run the Guard, Loki, and yet you do whatever Heimdall or Frey or Freyda suggests. I wonder if they didn’t go beyond the call of duty to plant the shark cluster on you. After all, I’ve looked at the charts, and it’s a good distance beyond what we usually patrol.” She smiled crookedly. “Much good it did them.”
I still had no answers about the shark mission. Who had put Sammis and Wryan up to that? Sammis certainly wouldn’t have intentionally done something to cost him Wryan, and Heimdall never ordered Sammis to do anything.
“Do you want to be Tribune?” she asked.
I had thought about being Tribune, I suppose. What Guard hadn’t? But for all of Verdis’s talk about running the Guard, I was fiftyish, looking twenty, and the Tribunes had tens of centuries of experience. The Counselors did too. Heimdall was waiting and plotting to be Tribune, as was Gilmesh, and Freyda of the cool voice and fires within was certainly not about to step down. Nor was Eranas for all the decades of rumors that he might. Unlike Heimdall, I certainly wasn’t up to murder for ambition.
At that, I laughed aloud.
“Loki?”
Loki, the man who destroyed a hundred thousand suns and a million years of life; the man who watched Zealor wipe out a gentle people at the behest of the Tribunes; the man who booby-trapped the gauntlet of
Heimdall—good old thunderbolt-throwing, storm-stalking, fire-breathing Loki was the Guard who couldn’t even consider killing the greatest tyrants in time.
Two hated my guts, and Freyda would be very sorry and shed a tear and stamp me out like an insect if she could and if I threatened the Guard or her ambition.
I looked at the planks above my head.
“Loki, can’t you hear?” Her eyes were hard.
“Hear? What do you mean?”
As she pointed to the back room, the singing became clear.
“Who’s the Guard that fired the stars and sank the sharks?
Who’s the Guard that wired the gloves and gave them sparks?
Who’s the Guard that went to Hell and almost died?
Who’s the Guard that told no truths and never lied?
Loki! Loki! That’s who, the Immortal God for me and you!
“Who’s the Guard that tamed the techs and stole the sun?
Who’s the Guard that faced the Tribs and made them run?
Who’s the Guard that stood on air without a wing?
Who’s the Guard that lives for life, the Guard we sing?
Loki! Loki! That’s who, the Immortal Guard for me and you!”
There was more, but I lost it in studying Verdis. I wonder if she’d composed the damned song—awful lyrics and all—just to put more pressure on me.
I hadn’t realized how many young Guards there were who could sing, and they turned that doggerel into a solid drinking song. They belted it out, and when I peered around the corner of the booth, I thought I saw a glimpse of Dercia and Kyra in with the other young Guards.
Verdis was attacking me with a cold stare. I wanted to shrug, but while the pain was decreasing, my shoulder still hurt.
What was the purpose of it all? Had Verdis arranged the whole scene, song and all, to suck me into some sort of conspiracy? If so, how had she managed to convince all those younger Guards to participate? But what could she want with me? Why even raise the idea of my running the Guard? Assuming I was crazy enough to want to be Tribune, I certainly wouldn’t have listened to her if I did get to be Tribune. As if I wanted to. Who the hell wanted to run a funeral procession? That’s the way things were headed, and I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so. My parents had dropped out decades earlier, and so had Baldur—and those unnamed and “lost” Guards. I wasn’t good at intrigue
or reading between the lines, and I was tired and irritable. So I asked.
“Just what are you asking?”
There was a long silence between us, though the inn was filled with noise as the trainees and the young Guards in the adjoining room launched into another round of song. Thankfully, it was a ditty about the seamier side of Odin Thor’s past.
“Loki, few of the really good divers know anything about how important the Guard is to Query. I’m not talking about temporal meddling or about the trappings of power. I’m talking about supplies. The duplicators, the generators, the equipment bank, the simplified mechanical basis of Query, make it possible for a few thousand people to support millions. What happens if anything goes wrong?”
Verdis should have been a political agitator somewhere, sometime. Maybe she was, and I didn’t know it. Her eyes flashed as she threw the questions at me, demanding that I believe what she had to say.
Oh, she was right in a way, but was the situation all that pressing?
“You have to know I’m not terribly sympathetic to the Tribunes,” I responded, “nor Heimdall, but what could go wrong? Query is still a fruitful planet, and we have a low population and a low birthrate.
“If the Guard disappeared tomorrow and never carried another item back to Query, it would be centuries before the system fell apart, if ever—unless the diving ability totally disappeared, or unless someone destroyed all the power generators and duplicators. So,” I concluded, “what are you diving for?”
Verdis opened her mouth, then shut it, paused as if to catalogue the arguments filed behind her smooth forehead and dark red hair. “You’ve been underestimated, Loki.”
“I doubt that,” I demurred. I didn’t expect or need any more gratuitous flattery.
She sipped the Firesong for a while, and I finished the last bites of my dinner.
“All right,” she said quietly. “Let’s assume you are right—that Query will survive without the Guard. Will it survive with the Guard in its present outlook?”
“What do you mean by the present outlook?” I wasn’t about to commit to anything, not until I knew what she had in mind and why, and maybe not then. The itching in my shoulder was worse, but when I leaned against the booth cushions, it hurt. I shifted my weight and waited.
“That increasing the Guard’s power is a desirable end in itself.”
Her words almost echoed those of Sammis, and that bothered me.
“Are you saying that the Tribunes’ goal seems to be to make the Guard more and more powerful?” I wasn’t about to admit that was my view, not publicly anyway, but I was already convinced that the present course of the Guard would pull down a round lot of cultures, whether or not that destruction was really necessary.
“Loki—after what you’ve been asked to do, is there really any doubt?”
“I’ve learned that the more obvious anything seems, the more there is to doubt.” I tried to keep my voice wry.
She set her empty glass on the table and stared at me. “Don’t tell me you’re still supporting every little thing the Tribunes propose?”
“As you may know, I am supporting Loki, past, present, and future.” Someone had told me that, and I played the quote back, hoping that it hadn’t been Verdis. If she had been the one, she didn’t comment.
“With that,” she said slowly, “I need another drink.”
That, at least, was a good idea, and I followed her, hoping the walk would relieve the agony of itching in my shoulder. I pushed the synthesizer stud for another firejuice. This time I reached the table before she did.
As soon as she sat down and took a deep swallow, she started in as if she hadn’t left off “Someone, or a number of someones, has been asking the Archives questions about history and parahistory, questions about critical turning points in any number of cultures which rivaled or could rival Query.”
“So?” I asked with a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“We don’t know who it is, but the fact that
someone
is asking that sort of question is ominous.”
I leaned back into the padding behind me, trying to focus on Verdis, but the intensity of the itching in my shoulder distracted me, and I missed some of what she said.
“ … may mean that since Query has so much inertia and so many Queryans outside the Guard are like sheep that this group wants to set up a man-on-a-white-horse situation—”
“A what?”
“Man on a white horse—great Black Father to take over in a period of crisis. Whoever it is doesn’t want to wait centuries for a real crisis and may be searching for a crisis to create.”
“Seems pretty farfetched to me,” I commented.
“It doesn’t to the Tribunes.”
That hit me like a flash of deep-space cold.
“Why do you say that?”
“Personnel has been asked to devise and issue priority codes to the Guard for the historical data banks, with a system so that no one, not
even a Tribune, can use someone else’s code. The other little feature we’re working on is a way for the Tribunes to track data requests without knowing the new code.”
I shook my head, not for the reason Verdis thought, of course. Someone was monitoring the data banks and my innocently programmed requests. I was glad I already had what I needed.
“We’re afraid that one way or another this power game between Guard X and the Tribunes will bring down the whole Guard structure.” Verdis had that intent look in her eyes again.
“Isn’t that overreacting? I mean, the Guard has survived centuries of power plots.”
“We don’t think so—not this time.”
“Who’s we, and why are you so convinced this time? Or are you afraid that the Tribunes may find your little group?”
“Dive again?” she asked.
“You keep talking about ‘we.’ And you keep avoiding my questions. You still haven’t answered what you want from me. You haven’t said why you think this rumored plotter, who could merely be a student of history, could do what no one else could do. And you haven’t identified your mysterious group that’s so involved with tracking down this rumored schemer.”
As she cocked her head to think up an answer she hoped I’d accept, I had another thought. Was the whole meal a gimmick to see if I’d reveal anything? Verdis didn’t want to tell me much, for all her supposed openness.
“I’d rather not say more, not right now. A number of us are concerned. As for what we want from you—that’s simple enough. You keep your word, and we want your word that you won’t meddle in the domestic affairs of the Guard and Query.”
I had to laugh, and that surprised Verdis more than anything I could have said. “You don’t even understand what you’re asking. If I repair one gauntlet, I’m meddling in Guard affairs. Or do you mean I should promise your vague conspiracy that I won’t try to set myself up as High Tribune? You make me sick. As if I wanted to become emperor of this time-flying gopher hole!” I wanted out of the inn, then and there. “Or does it mean that I should stand idly by as you and your company take over the Guard?”
“Loki, that’s not what I meant at all!” Her protest was pretty loud at that. “You plod on in your own world, buried in Maintenance, oblivious to almost everything. Eranas is making noises about stepping down, and Heimdall is using every tactic and favor in the book to ensure he’s selected to replace Eranas. Everyone wonders who is staking out past
history and why. Gilmesh is trying to untrack Heimdall by showing Frey’s incompetence, while Ferrin and Tyron are trying to save their hides by covering for Frey. People still ask what happened to Baldur and Wryan, and the Tribunes ignore Sammis because he advises Heimdall, and Heimdall gathers more and more loyal goons. And you don’t pay any attention at all.”
I wished I’d left earlier. I could tell Verdis I cared, and blow myself out of the water, because what I intended certainly wasn’t what she wanted. Or I could say I didn’t care and be lumped in with the status quo she loathed and distrusted.
Like so many times before, I struggled with conflicting thoughts. What could I say?
The songfest in the other room had degenerated into assorted conversations. Phrases drifted through the archway as I looked down at the empty plate and glass and as Verdis looked at me.
“ … Guard’ll last forever … Loki for Tribune … never happen, not with the bitch goddess … fly Kyra … sheep, and they’ll never care … who’ll do the dirty work … Domestic Affairs in Hilgar … shit work …”
“Put that way,” I said finally, because I had to get out of the inn, “I guess I don’t. Not the way you mean. But maybe I ought to. Maybe I should.”