Timegods' World (40 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy

BOOK: Timegods' World
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Sounds simple … but either you can or you can’t.
After passing my Test with Counselor Freyda, I slid home to wait the days or seasons before I was called for training, ready to bask in my parents’ pride.
“I passed! I passed!” I shouted, plunging onto the porch where my parents were eating their midday meal.
“I didn’t doubt you would for a moment,” said my father, scarcely looking up from his fruit.
“I hope you’ll be happy, dear,” added my mother.
“But … I mean … not everyone …” I couldn’t understand it. They were the ones who had told me all the legends of the Guard.
All of them, from the terrible losses of the Frost Giant Wars to the heroic deeds of Odin Thor, to the Triumvirate, even my grandfather Ragnorak … all the sacrifices made by the Guard to restore Query to the glory that had preceded the devastation of the Frost Giants.
I’d gone to sleep so many nights as a child looking at my father’s shining gold hair, listening to him tell about the hardships that his father Ragnorak had endured on mission after mission for the Temporal Guard.
Now neither of them seemed overjoyed.
“You don’t seem particularly pleased,” I charged.
“If that’s what you really want, dear,” answered my mother, “we’re both happy for you.” She smiled so faintly it wasn’t a smile, and turned back to her lunch, a wild salad she’d gathered from the woods behind the house.
Even my father didn’t meet my eyes after the first few instants. He picked at his fruit silently.
I thought about sliding out into the mountains to be alone, but what difference did it make? I was apparently alone even at home.
My room was on the second level at the back, overlooking the small gorge at the other end of the ridge. The gorge separated the clearing where the house stood from the rest of the woods that sloped down over the lower hills. In the distance on a fair day, I could sometimes see the heights of the western Bardwalls over the evergreens.
I slumped into the hammock chair on the shady side of my small balcony and stared at the trees.
There was a tap at the door. Doors weren’t really necessary, but were there as a matter of courtesy and custom. Also, short slides are more trouble than they’re worth. Once when I was about ten, I guess, my door stayed locked for a full season. It didn’t seem to matter. That was before I realized that my parents could slide around it if they had wanted to—they so seldom dived or slid that it never really occurred to me that they could. I don’t think they ever did. The room got rather messy, but the question hadn’t occurred to me.
“Come in,” I called, knowing from the sharpness of the knock that it was Dad.
He opened the door quietly, came out, and sat in the highbacked stool closest to the hammock chair.
“You don’t understand, Loki, and you’re confused.” He waved me to silence and went on. “How could your father, the son of the great Ragnorak, hero and Guard, be so casual about your decision to join the Guard? I can tell from your face. You’re about to say that I couldn’t make it, didn’t pass my Test.”
He smiled gently. “That’s not quite true. I never even tried to take the Test. Nor did your mother. She’s the great-granddaughter of Sammis Olon. I suspect, looking at you, we could have passed. That wasn’t the question. My question was: What’s the Guard for?”
What was Dad driving at? And why had he chickened out of taking his Test? Who was Sammis Olon?
“To protect us,” I answered automatically.
“From what? Nobody’s seen a Frost Giant in over a million years.” His voice never lifted.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. And what about the rest of the universe?” He just didn’t seem to understand.
“What about it? There’s no danger in it, particularly to you.”
I couldn’t understand him. “Then why did you tell me all those” stories about the Guard? They were true, weren’t they?
Weren’t they?”
“Yes, Loki, they were true. My father, your grandfather, destroyed promising civilizations, changed history on a dozen planets that were no real threat because of a million-year-old fear. When I told you those stories, I thought you would understand the Guard is a grubby and unnecessary business. Even the thunderbolts thrown by the Guards had a price. I tried to tell you that—how entire civilizations were changed so they would develop something, with no thought as to what those changes did. Ydris the mighty is no more—so we could have gauntlets that throw thunderbolts. I tried to portray the dangers, the horrors, and the arbitrary nature of meddling with Time and the lives of innocents.”
“Innocents? What about the time the soldiers of the Anarchate blew off his wrist?” I remembered that one vividly. “Or the time he stopped the Perrsions from using a city-buster on Kaldir? Or—”
“Everything I told you was true,” he interrupted, “or what my father told me. Lying wasn’t one of his many vices.”
“You were jealous of your own father! That’s it!” I was seething.
He fixed me with a strange look in his eyes. “That’s enough, Loki,” he said calmly, almost gently. “I don’t think we have that much more to talk about. Your mother wanted me to ask about your decision once more. Passing your Test doesn’t mean you have to join the Guard, but I can see that your mind is made up. Arguing about the role of the Guard accomplishes very little.”
He held up his hand to stop my objections and continued. “The entire nature of the Guard is subjective. It’s a different world, a series of worlds. Your mother and I have tried to become as self-sufficient as possible here. We built the house with our own hands, harvest what we can from the lands and the woods. In the Guard, you will find machines to supply everything …”
He went on and on, telling me over and over, way after way, that the Guard was wrong in this, wrong in that. And he’d never been in the Guard. I wondered if he hated his father for being such a hero. Obviously, I wasn’t going to have that problem.
I listened and didn’t say a word until he finished.
“Thank you, Dad. Is there anything around here that needs to be done?”
He looked at me as if I’d climbed out from under a rock.
“You really don’t understand, do you?” He flexed his forearms, ridged with the muscles developed from his years of manual self-sufficiency, and kept staring at me.
What was there to understand? For some strange reason, he was giving the Guard a trial and judging it guilty without any firsthand experience.
We sat there, maybe for twenty units, neither of us wanting to say anything. An odd picture—young man and a youth almost a man, yet one was father, one son. On Query you can’t tell age by outward physical appearances.
Finally, Dad slipped off the stool, brushed his longish hair back off his forehead, and walked into the house. Before he left, he said, “You’re welcome here as long as you want to stay, son.” And damn it, he sounded like he meant it.
I kept watching the trees, as if I could see them grow or something. They didn’t. The only thing that grew was their shadows.
The first few days of summer were like that. I couldn’t take the sitting. I thought about Dad’s comments on the Guard, the harsh conditions, the struggles, and I got scared. Just a little.
Why should I have been scared? I didn’t know, but I started in with the ax and split a winter’s worth of wood in a ten-day, and the hell with the blisters.
Next came the running. If the Guard wanted toughness, I intended to be ready. I’ve got heavy thighs and short legs. Do you know what running over sandy hills is like with small feet and short legs?
I tried to chase down flying gophers. Never caught one, but within ten-days I was getting pretty close before they disappeared into their sand holes.
At first, the temptation to cheat on the running, to slide a bit ahead undertime, was appealing, but I figured that wouldn’t help my physical condition much. Besides, I could already slide from rock tip to rock tip without losing my balance.
Once when I was sprinting back across the clearing to the house, I caught a glimpse of Dad watching through the railings. I don’t think he knew I saw him, and the expression on his face—pride mixed with something else, confusion, sadness—I didn’t know.
Through all the quiet meals we shared those long ten-days, I knew they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand.
One morning a Guard trainee in black arrived with a formal invitation from the Tribunes for me to begin training.
Along with the invitation was a short list of what I was to bring, with the notation that nothing else was required.
That made packing pretty easy.
TEN OF US were ushered into a small Tower room with comfortable stools, a podium, and a wall screen.
Six young women, four young men—girls and boys really—we sat and waited. None of us knew each other, and with the reticence common to Query, no one said anything.
I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m Loki.” I glared at the tall girl. She had her black hair cut short, and, surprisingly, it suited her.
“Loragerd,” she said gravely.
The other women were Halcyon, Aleryl, Shienl, Patrice, and Carrine. The men were Ferrin, Gill, Tyron. I thought women and men, but we were all at that age of being neither youth nor adult.
Like rocks on the beach, waiting, we sat.
Through the open archway marched a small man dressed in the black singlesuit of the Guard. On his left collar was a four-pointed silver star. His hair was so black it was blue, and his dark eyes glittered.
“Good morning, trainees. I’m Gilmesh, and this will be your indoctrination lecture.” He settled himself behind the podium, studied each of us for a fraction of a unit, cleared his throat, and went on.
“First and foremost, the Guard relies on voluntary subjection to absolute discipline. By this I mean that you agree to live under the rules. The rules are few and absolute. We’ll get to those shortly. But why do you think we have to do it this way?”
Dead silence. No one was about to volunteer anything, which was just as well because Gilmesh rushed on as if he hadn’t expected an answer.
“The Guard is a small organization with a big job. We don’t have the personnel to coddle discipline problems. Minor offenses merit special work assignments or dismissal. Major offenses normally result in a sentence to Hell and dismissal. High Crimes lead to a sentence on Hell and a chronolobotomy.”
I understood everything but the last term. Most of us must have worn
the same puzzled expression because he stopped and explained.
“Chronolobotomy … that’s a condensation of a medical term I’m not certain I can remember, let alone pronounce. It means surgical removal of all time-diving abilities. Sometimes limited planet-sliding talent remains, but that depends on the individual.”
At that point the room seemed a whole lot colder.
“Well … what does the Guard do?” asked Gilmesh, ignoring the chill he had created with his casual revelations. “The Guard is charged with the maintenance of civil order on Query, the elimination of possible threats to Query and other peace-loving races in our sector of the galaxy, and the encouragement of peace. That’s it.”
The four-pointed star emblem of the Temporal Guard flashed onto the wall screen. Seemed to me that the duties of the Guard gave it a lot of power. Of course, without the Guard, the Frost Giants had nearly wiped us out.
Gilmesh surveyed the ten of us.
“Any of you may drop out of the trainee program at any time in the next three years before we get to field training … and probably half of you will. If you decide to leave the Guard after that, you’re responsible for two years of administrative duties or an equivalent sentence on Hell. Administrative duties are routine clerical or maintenance functions. In short, you’ll be menials. In return, you’ll receive restricted time-diving privileges to a number of systems. Is that clear?”
It was quite clear, even to a group of mixed-age youngsters. I was probably the youngest. We never did compare ages.
Gilmesh went on outlining more guidelines, rules, regulations, without arousing much interest until the end of his spiel.
“Academic training will take roughly four years, and diving training will start about two years from now. You will not—I repeat,
not
—attempt any time-diving on your own during this period until you are cleared by the Guard. Here’s why.”
The screen flashed on again, and the narrator began cataloguing the possible dangers of diving by untrained personnel. Impressive … airless planets, planets with poisonous atmospheres, predators, black holes, everything that could possibly go wrong.
It ended with a condensation of the Last Law. “No time manipulation by a member of a species can undo the death of any other species member from that same base system.” Translated loosely, once a Queryan dies, no amount of time-fiddling by the Guard can undo that death. If you blow it and die, you stay dead. Dead is dead.
As I recalled from my tutors, the casualties among the earliest timedivers had been fantastic … well over eighty percent. I was beginning
to see why. You don’t think about it as a child. You slide where you want to on the planet, and even if you backtime or foretime on Query itself, you can’t break out. You feel safe.
Gilmesh ended the indoctrination lecture by giving us room assignments in the West Barracks. He dismissed us after telling us to locate our rooms, drop off our gear, and report back in one hundred units.
We did and when we returned were directed to Special Stores for uniform fittings. We each got four black singlesuits and a green four-pointed star to go on the collar.
That was the beginning of the routine.
The classroom work didn’t seem all that hard, not to me, but within ten-days Shienl and Gill had left.
I enjoyed the mechanical theory class, taught by a blond giant of a man named Baldur. Often he was units late or held us, and his explanations of the importance of mechanics in culture could be long-winded.
Baldur asked questions … lots of them … in a quiet light voice that penetrated, made you listen.
“Tyron, I know you’re not the most mechanically inclined trainee, but you do have the capability to understand the basic outline of something as simple as a generator.”
Tyron flushed and mumbled, “Is it that important?”
Baldur didn’t raise his voice, didn’t seem flustered, just asked another question.
“Tyron, most cultures have a ruling class or elite or power structure. That elite’s position is normally based on its control of the available technology, directly or indirectly, and its ability to direct the use of resources. Control and direction are maximized when that elite understands the technology it directs. What happens when an elite loses its collective ability to understand the basis of the technology it controls?”
“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with generators?”
I didn’t understand either, but both Loragerd and Halcyon nodded as if they did, and Ferrin grinned.
“Loragerd?” Baldur asked.
“They begin to lose control. They aren’t the elite any more.”
“What about the Guard?” countered Ferrin.
I thought it was a dumb question.
“It’s all dumb,” protested Patrice. “Ruling classes don’t just disappear. And the Guard’s no elite.”
Baldur never let it go with a simple resolution. “Is the Guard an elite?”
Tyron suppressed a groan, I could tell, but I didn’t see why. Sure, the Guard was an elite. Pretty obvious.
“Yes,” I burst out.
“Why don’t you finish the logic for Tyron, then, Loki?”
What logic? I didn’t have any, but I decided I’d better bumble through as well as I could.
“If the Guard is an elite,” I started slowly, “then it must control some technology. If Guards don’t understand technology, then the Guard will lose control.” I paused before the immediate objection came to mind. “But the Guard has power because Guards can time-dive, and that’s not based on technology.”
“It’s not?” responded Baldur. “How can you power stunners without generators? How can you stay warm and dry without heat or housing and not become a rootless society that shifts with the weather? I’ll admit that the line is harder to draw for Query, but it’s still valid.”
He stopped, cleared his throat, and continued speaking. “That’s something you all ought to think about. In the case of a mid-tech culture like Sertis, the example is clear …”
He launched into a description of how the local monarchs ruled through control of the water supplies—the water empire model, he called it.
We got back to generators before too long, and this time Tyron paid attention. Why the digression would have motivated him I didn’t see. That was because I thought generators were more interesting than all that speculative stuff about elites and control—or Baldur’s comments about excessive waste generation, but we found out about that firsthand later.
We had other courses, too, on the administrative law of the Guard, on meteorology, EQ biology, comparative weaponry … a whole mishmash.
The first year was sort of a crash backgrounder.
In the second year, along with more advanced mechanical and technical training, Baldur started us on simple equipment repairs in a side area of the Maintenance Hall.
Patrice protested.
“Why do we have to know how to put all this tangled junk back together? I’m not going to be a mechanic. I’m a diver.”
Baldur just smiled. “Do you want an answer, or are you angry because it’s difficult?”
Patrice glowered at him. “An answer.”
“As a diver, you will be using this equipment, and you’ll use it better if you understand it. Understanding only comes when you have a feel for it. Knowing how to repair it gives that feel. Besides, if we repair it,
there’s less waste, and that means less junk that trainees have to lug to Vulcan.
“Incidentally, Patrice,” he finished with a milder tone, “no one in the Guard is
just
a timediver. We all have support jobs as well. If not in Maintenance, then in Linguistics, Medical, Assignments, Research, Archives, or what have you.”
I remember Gilmesh mentioning that, but hearing it and starting in with oily metal and dented wrist gauntlets was something else.
Not that it was all work, by any means. Less than half our day was taken up with academic training those first two years.
Every so often I saw Counselor Freyda. She had me over to her quarters in Quest for dinner two, three times, told me about my grandfather. I guessed she followed my training because of old Ragnorak.

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