By MORNING THE violent itching had subsided to mere irritation, and the scab had dried to the point where it looked like it was almost ready to come off. I concentrated hard, and it seemed to help enough that the scab fell away. The skin was still pinkish and tender to the touch, and the purple green of a bruise underlay the new skin. Still, the ability to heal myself was improving. I supposed it took practice.
I was still stiff, though, as I discovered in hurrying to get cleaned up and dressed. As I dressed, my eyes flicked to the bronze bell. I hadn’t looked at it in a while, but the inscription was still unreadable, even with the handful of new languages I’d picked up. With so many in the galaxy, where would I begin?
I wanted to get to the Tower early, and I did, early enough that no one was there except the duty trainees.
The production equipment I had set in the corner of Maintenance didn’t take more than a few units to ready. Shortly after I fed in the parameter formula, little black boxes, each with a Locator tag and an uncharged power cell within, began popping out of the other end of the system. From there they went into a converter that charged them, and right into a time-shielded bin.
The shielding might have been an unnecessary precaution, but I had warped the plastic edges out of time enough. With all the rumors being circulated, it would save me some grief. Who wanted Locator to register one thousand “Lokis” in Maintenance—assuming the real-time parameters were even lifted?
After the first units dropped into the bin, I took one and ducked behind one of the older machines for a quick timedive backtime to Abelard. I dropped off the little black box there, stuffed it under the roots of some plant, and dived back to Query.
As I broke out in the Maintenance Hall, I checked around, but saw no one. If my black gadget worked as designed, it should already have been registering my continuing “presence” on Abelard. Later, I’d have to verify that.
I walked back to the compact production machine, a modified duplicator and mass focus assembly unit and watched the output build up. Then I began my regular work by assigning the repairs which had been brought in by the duty trainees. Brendan arrived within units and carted off his share.
I carried Narcissus’s to his space, and Brendan came back and delivered Elene’s. Before he got out of sight, I gestured. “Would you start to work on setting up what Dercia will need? No hurry, but I’ll leave that up to you—unless you run into something strange.”
“I’d be happy to.”
Brendan could be a real pleasure to work with, and probably would be a better Maintenance supervisor than I had ever been. As I ran through the routine and not-so-routine jobs I’d assigned myself, the equipment behind me continued to produce black boxes.
I needed to work on access to a Locator terminal, preferably when no one knew what I was doing.
Terminals existed in three places—the Personnel Hall, under the scrutiny of Verdis and Gilmesh; the Tribunes’ spaces; and the Locator section, which had a full-time duty staff.
With all the concerns Verdis had mentioned, especially that bit about
the Tribunes’ interest, I wasn’t too interested in a repeat of my imitation of Frey and the nighttime follies. Sliding and entering is officially classified as thievery and merits a sentence on Hell. While no Guard or Tribune would ever get me back on Hell, skulking around after hours was definitely being watched more closely.
Paradoxically, my success in Maintenance had denied me the one legitimate access to a Locator terminal I used to have. When the Tribunes had made me a Senior Guard and given Maintenance back to me, my name had been lifted from the emergency divers’ watch list. That particular watch list had been Ferrin’s innovation to ensure a first-class diver was always on call, but supervisors were exempted.
Somehow, I had to get myself back into rescue work, at least occasionally. I turned off the phony tag producer and covered the bin, setting out to corner Ferrin.
He was still in charge of the watch list, despite effectively running all of Locator. He was also struggling along by himself at the moment I walked in.
After pleasantries, I hit him. “Look, you script-pusher. First, I’ve gotten tied into support and administration. I never get anything routine or moderately interesting in diving missions—just killers when Heimdall cooks up something designed to fry or freeze me.”
Ferrin didn’t even flinch. “So what do you want?”
“The only diversion I ever got was occasionally rescuing someone. Now I can’t do that.”
“Loki …” Ferrin sighed. “Far be it for this lowly personage to question the ways of the high and the mighty, nor would I ever wish to cast aspersions upon the god of forge and metal, whose mighty hammer fuels the weapons of the Guard …”
“Ferrin, can’t we discuss this straightforwardly?”
“ … nor would I wish to be faulted by the powers that were, are, and ever shall be for dissuading the mighty Guard of fire from his appointed responsibilities …”
“My responsibilities are minimal, and, besides, we’re all caught up. Even Frey can’t find anything more that needs repair.”
“ … and his duties as a supervisor …”
“Ferrin!” I must have sounded desperate enough. At least, he stopped the high-sounding obfuscation and looked at me. “I’ll have to check.”
“Then ask Eranas, or Freyda, or Kranos. Just let me be an occasional fill-in—a backup.”
Ferrin finally grinned, and that meant he’d look into it. So I went back to Maintenance and resumed the production of black boxes. By
the end of a ten-day, I had nearly a thousand stashed behind a time-protected wall in the Aerie and had disassembled the equipment back into less obvious uses.
Days passed, and I was about to take another whack at Ferrin when a trainee showed up late one afternoon with a polite request from Ferrin, asking if I would stand in for Sammis that evening in Locator.
That bothered me. Sammis rarely, if ever, missed a duty, even after Wryan’s death at the hands of the sharks. But I was in Locator for the night watch.
The standby diver, unfortunately, doesn’t have a console, and I couldn’t get near one.
Duty was uneventful, as it usually was, and by the time I left I was tied in knots. A run across the training fields before I slid back to the Aerie helped calm me down.
The false Locator tags were still stacked up behind the phony wall, showing, if they worked, and if anyone cared to disable the Locator “now” cutouts, that I was always in the Aerie. I didn’t want to proceed until I knew they did in fact work.
As the time dragged out, what Verdis would do was another question, and I hoped she wouldn’t try to drag me into whatever she had in mind.
I didn’t escape that easily.
Several days after my standby in Locator, she showed up in Maintenance after the others had already left—even Brendan. I was closing up.
“You’ve been avoiding me. Why?”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“There’s a time for thinking and a time for action.”
I tried not to swallow, since I didn’t like the implications of what she was saying. “I’m not exactly up for snap decisions that might overturn two million years of relatively successful traditions. Also, you haven’t said what you want and what you have in mind.”
And she, or they, hadn’t. The only general concern that they’d expressed was the wish that I not try to take over things. I didn’t believe that for a moment. There was more involved—much more—but I was a lousy snoop. Not one sign of what was going on had surfaced anywhere. Or if it had, I didn’t know what to look for. Probably the latter.
“Caution doesn’t fit your image,” Verdis suggested ironically.
That was another way of saying my courage had deserted me.
“Have I ever shown I was a coward? Where was your courageous group when I was shark-hunting at the end of time? Or rescuing divers under sonic assault? Or getting squashed by heavy-planet spirals?”
I’d been fearful and cautious plenty of times, not that Verdis would know, but I decided to defend my image.
“It’s easy when you’re not dealing with real people,” she said, before turning away.
Real people? That bothered me. Both Verdis and the Tribunes seemed to think that no one outside of Query was real. Just because they couldn’t control time they weren’t real?
The other thing that nagged at me was the lack of certainty. I still had no real idea of what was going on—just bits and pieces and parts of people’s reactions. I had flash-slid through most of the Tower, avoiding the Tribunes’ spaces, time and time again, and never found a trace of anything. Neither had my microsnoops. The only strange item was the time-shrouded table in the Tribunes’ private council room that I’d viewed from the undertime. Still, finding almost nothing meant nothing. Anyone in the Guard could slide somewhere and meet. They didn’t need the Tower.
Days passed, but Verdis didn’t come back, didn’t press me, and that bothered me as much as being pressed.
I waited for another standby in Locator, and finally got it. The night was an uneventful one, starting out just like the first duty I’d taken from Sammis, until close to local midnight.
A figure appeared on the public slide stage, a woman who started screaming. Helton, one of the two console operators, got up and headed across the stage to her. I slipped into his seat and accessed my own Locator code.
The console began scripting all the past locales. I wasn’t interested in verifying the whole mess, but just looked to see if the phony tag I dropped backtime on Abelard registered. It did.
I blanked the console and hurried over to Helton and the distressed woman. She was pouring out her tale of woe—one of those screwy and, thankfully, very rare cases.
The woman’s first contract-mate, and father of her ten-year-old daughter, had slid into her quarters, grabbed the daughter, and threatened to kill himself and the daughter unless she renewed the lapsed contract.
She refused, and the father disappeared with the daughter.
“He’s crazy. I couldn’t ever renew … not with him. He’ll kill her … I didn’t think he would … but he will …” she gasped out between sobs.
“What’s her name, your daughter’s name, her personal code?” Helton pursued.
I stood there looking sympathetic and helpful. Wasn’t much I could do until they’d come up with some sort of location.
“Regine,” the mother stammered. “RGE-66-MC.” The MC was standard
for “minor child” and would be replaced with a color code once she matured, generally after she was the age to take the Test.
Giron was on the other console and plugged the codes into the Locator system.
“Undertime, Lestral, near the top of the Sequin Falls!” Giron announced.
“Looks like he means it,” commented Helton, sotto voce.
I leaned over Giron’s shoulder to scan the coordinates and dived right from the spot. I knew where I was headed. I’d been there before. Most Queryans have also. The Falls are quite a scenic attraction, drop straight down for kilos into the Lestral Trench. The Trench makes the Bardwalls look like the mounds around a flying gopher hole.
The water of the Sequin Falls is black, coal black and cold, if not freezing. The chunks of ice that dot the waters bob like stars on that black expanse and fall like meteors to the Trench below. They glow with a light of their own because of the ice worms and glittering microorganisms that are so common on Lestral.
Any delay on my part was out of the question, regardless of whether I needed a warm suit or not. The father wasn’t a diver—at least he’d gone for real-time Lestral, and he had already broken out.
With the coordinates in mind, I was undertime, and instead of following the time-lines, I was crossing, vaulting, trying to minimize even the minute crossover delay from the undertime to the now.
For all that, “lucky” was the word.
The father had thrown Regine into the water near the brink, and the conditions helped me locate her even from the under-time, because bodies glow like the ice against the black water.
She was heading over the edge by the time I located her, frozen in fall as I studied her position. From there it was straightforward. Not easy. Sounds matter-of-fact, but to break out in water cascading vertically, thrashing me around, while trying to grasp a child in the space of less than a unit and dive safely undertime as we both dropped toward the biggest pile of sharp rocks on the planet was not an average dive, or a typical rescue.
I lost Regine in the cold water, and it took three quick undertime slides before I got a grip on her, and just as I touched her arm, a chunk of something stabbed me in the shoulder. I kept hold of her night robe, but I had to have a firm grip on flesh to be able to carry her undertime.
I grabbed with my other hand. My feet somersaulted over my head, but my left hand closed over her wrist, and I dived, wrenching her out of time.
We got back to the Tower Infirmary before Helton or the mother had left the Domestic Affairs section, I figured.