Timegods' World (60 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy

BOOK: Timegods' World
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IN A PARATIME that waits for a favorable change wind, the Grand Commander stands in front of the star plot.
She is impatient, and her tail lashes behind her in subdued swings.
The priestess, her scales yellow with age, enters, bows a bow that is more token than real, and presents the eternasteel tablet to the Supreme Commander of the star fleet.
The Commander’s violet eyes flicker, and her tail is still. The ratings plugged into the command center are aware of the tension. Their green scales stand on edge as they wait for a reaction.
The Commander’s eyes dart from the tablet that may be ancient to the star plot and back again
.
Thump! Her tail strikes the deck with a single crash. She is pleased.
The ratings relax as the Commander begins readying the order of battle. The target is the second planet of an obscure system with a yellow sun.
The arrays of black ships accelerate toward their jump point. For now … for now … they are not real, only smoke in a paratime reality, owing their existence, such as it is, to the set of one god’s mind, that god who may or may not deliver the tablet that rests before the star plot
…
A LONG DAY, one that stretched out under the high ceilings of the Tower as if it would never end—that was the kind of day the morning promised.
Most technical peoples think that time passes at a uniform rate. It doesn’t. Any good timediver knew that. A chronometer will measure intervals precisely, but not the passage of time. Usually, the difference isn’t that noticeable, unless compared to biological processes. According to the chronometer, biology varies, not time.
Scientists explain the variance, if they try at all, by citing biological eccentricities, anything but the real answer, which is that time doesn’t pass at a uniform rate. In most places, it doesn’t vary much, it’s true, but time is not an interval.
What is it? It’s time. Simple answer, but the most accurate.
On that morning when time had dragged itself out, I left my work space to find Baldur, figuring I’d have to wait before he roused himself out of his deep concentration and recognized me. Even after all the years, he still made me wait.
Baldur wasn’t in his space. One look, and I knew he wouldn’t be back.
Baldur never left loose ends, and his old-fashioned writing platform was bare. Only a few standard manuals remained in the shelves by his stool. Baldur liked printed references. Most Guards preferred console scans. The tape access cabinet and record file cases had been polished.
I tiptoed over to the writing platform and opened the single drawer. Empty. The whole space was empty.
To make sure, I checked everything. Not a single sign of the blond giant who ran Maintenance. I debated trying to track him down before letting the Tribunes know, but decided against it. Better to keep playing it safe and not give Heimdall and company any free shots.
I rushed up the ramps to the Tribunes’ chambers and asked for Freyda or Eranas. I didn’t really want to deal with Kranos, not that I had anything against him, but he was so silent I hadn’t the faintest idea where he stood.
I was tapping my feet by the time Eranas appeared.
“Baldur’s left. Permanently.”
“How do you know?”
I told him about the tidy way in which all the loose ends had been tied up, about how that would square with Baldur.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Eranas mused. “Thank you.” He turned to go.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Locate him?”
“Yes. We’ll have to do something about Maintenance, I suppose. As for Baldur … as a Counselor, he can leave the Guard or Query anytime he wants … and how could I compel Baldur to do anything? Nor should I.” He smiled at me. “Even if you found Baldur, what would you say?”
Eranas walked back into his private chamber, leaving me there open-mouthed. Something had to be wrong. Even if it weren’t I wanted to hear it from Baldur.
After thinking a unit, I crossed the Tower and walked into Personnel to tell Gilmesh.
“Figures,” he growled. “On your way back to Maintenance, take this. I’d appreciate it if you could do something.” He thrust a dented wrist gauntlet at me. “It’s Lorren’s. Damned fool left it on during hand-to-hand with Sammis.”
I didn’t have to take it, but there wasn’t much point in upsetting Gilmesh. So I did. Lorren was Gilmesh’s latest addition, a young blond senior trainee with an insipid smile. I couldn’t help but grin at the thought of what Sammis could do to a trainee’s arrogance. I had felt lucky to get through his course with a few bruises, and they were nothing compared to what I still got in my less and less frequent sessions, with him and Wryan.
The corridors of the Tower were quiet in the morning. The youngsters who visited and the citizens with business usually arrived in the afternoon. I never did figure that out, since people lived all over the planet and could slide in from anywhere, but there seemed to be a custom about it.
I waved at Loragerd as I passed the Linguistics Center, but she didn’t see me, and I didn’t want to interrupt her.
Back at my own space in Maintenance, I dumped the wrist gauntlet on the bench, sat down on the high stool I liked.
Baldur was gone. That was it, and whether Eranas or Freyda or Gilmesh cared, I had to find out why. To locate Baldur, or see if I could, I needed his assignments file and a Locator check. The question was how to get either.
Gilmesh ran Personnel and didn’t seem interested. He’d agree with Eranas. On the other hand, Eranas wasn’t going to run around immediately announcing Baldur’s disappearance. So maybe I could play it dumb, if I moved quickly. Once again, I might be risking a bit, but safer to play dumb aboveboard than sneaky and get caught.
I needed an entree, so to speak. I got to work on Lorren’s gauntlet. Took only a few units to fix it, primarily because I replaced the microcircuitry, lock, stock, and barrel. Wasteful but quick. Later I’d have to break down the damaged modules which I’d set aside and fix them. I didn’t care much for total black-boxing as a standard repair technique, but it did come in handy when I was in a hurry.
Gilmesh was a creature of habit, and one of his habits was sipping cuerl at midmorning with Frey and Heimdall. That was one of the reasons I hurried.
With the gauntlet in hand, I trotted up the ramps to Personnel and loitered around the bend in the corridor until I heard the quick clump of boots heading toward the small lounge where the Senior Guards often took a break.
Time to present Lorren with his gauntlet.
He was sitting at the small console in the back corner, with his blond hair hanging over his heavy brows and that insipid smile planted firmly and unwaveringly on his face.
Verdis was hunched over a worktable in the adjoining room, oblivious to my appearance.
“Here’s your gauntlet,” I announced.
Lorren nodded, didn’t even open his mouth.
“I need to run down Baldur’s whereabouts. Can you run out an update on his past assignments?”
“I need Gilmesh’s approval.”
“Look, Baldur is my supervisor. If he’s upset at my running him down, he’ll take care of me. You don’t have to worry about it.”
Lorren shook his head.
I picked the gauntlet up from his console. The smile disappeared, to be replaced with a half-pout.
“What are you doing?”
“If you don’t want to cooperate, fine. As a full Guard, I can require any trainee to fix his own gear. All I have to do is supply the guidance and the equipment.”
“But it’s fixed,” protested Lorren sulkily.
“I black-boxed it, as a favor. All the components I replaced need to be checked out and repaired, if necessary.”
I stood there. Lorren thought about it. Gilmesh certainly wouldn’t let him off from his duties to fix the result of his own carelessness. He’d have to come down to Maintenance on his own time. And what I was asking for wasn’t Baldur’s current location, but where he’d once been.
“All right, if you’re going to be that way about it …”
With that tone, the Senior Guards would have had his head, but he was young, and I wasn’t a Senior Guard. He punched a series of commands into the console. I held onto the gauntlet. When he handed me the printout and the tape, a few units later, I let go of the gauntlet.
I left, and I didn’t even run into Gilmesh on the way out. In a corner down the ramp and around the corner, I took a quick look at the printout. The earliest dive entry date was over two hundred centuries back—real-time.
I hadn’t thought Baldur had been with the Guard twenty thousand years, but I supposed it wasn’t all that surprising, particularly considering how little he spoke.
Frey wasn’t around when I marched through the archway into Locator. I hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened. Ferrin was doing most of the real work anyway. Without a doubt, Ferrin was the worst diver in memory to have passed the Test. He had more than redeemed himself in the running of the Locator system, which was a definite blessing to the Guard, and at least Frey was smart enough to let him do it and take all the credit.
One of the things Ferrin had done was rearrange the rotation system for all trainees and Guards by figuring their actual diving abilities into the schedule. That way, there was always a strong timediver on Locator duty.
Sitting in front of a pile of tapes, Ferrin was hunched over in his high-backed stool.
“Ferrin, can you run a Locator cross-check for me? Baldur went off without explaining some Maintenance scheduling, and, frankly, I need some of his technical expertise. Won’t take long, but no one seems to know where he went.” It was a lame explanation, but the best I could come up with.
Ferrin’s eyebrows lifted. “He’s a Counselor.”
“I know. I don’t have his code. But Locator must have some way of finding Counselors.”
“Loki, since I am a literal-minded and very junior administrator, and since you undoubtedly have a worthwhile purpose in mind, I will indeed facilitate your search. Former fellow trainee, you have been so imploring that your search must indeed be pressing and necessary.”
I tried to restrain a smile. A diver Ferrin might not be, but he knew I was skirting the edge. Ferrin, perhaps more than anyone I knew, could smell where dead fish would turn up long before they were hatched. But he knew, and I mean
knew,
what would hurt the Guard and what wouldn’t.
He slipped off the stool, took the tape data bloc, and eased it into his tracer console. “I suspect that this is totally unnecessary, and that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to do it.”
I couldn’t believe that. Baldur disappearing and a tracer unnecessary?
Ferrin sensed my questions. “I’m a snoop, Loki. Surely you remember that. That’s why I can keep this place going—because I know more than I’m supposed to. News does have a way of spreading, you know.” He turned back to the tracer screen. “You take a look.”
I looked.
The console had printed in its stylized script, “No present trace. Individual does not register outside previous locales.”
Baldur couldn’t disappear. Not like that. But the console said his back- and foretime traces existed only in the places his assignment tape said he’d already been. Ergo … he’d disappeared. Right?
Something tickled the back of my mind, a nursery rhyme from the past, something about the little man who wasn’t there. Yesterday he wasn’t there, and today he wasn’t there again.
My eyes burned, because two other people I had relied on, even as I had fought them, had also disappeared. They didn’t register on Locator, and their house was slowly losing its time protection and falling apart, but no one but me had ever visited, not that I could tell.
Ferrin waited while I struggled.
“Loki,” said Ferrin gently, very gently, “whatever Baldur’s done, he deserves to be left alone. If he went to all the trouble of disguising his trace enough that we can’t locate him, you can certainly see he doesn’t want to be disturbed. And if he were dead, wouldn’t the change in the signal show?”
“Maybe.” I was still suspicious.
“You suspect everyone and everything. You should. But nobody disliked Baldur. Nobody, not even Heimdall.”
What Ferrin said made sense. I just didn’t want to believe that Baldur,
who was so concerned about the future of Quest and Query, would off and take a dusting. But my father had.
I left the data bloc with Ferrin, pocketed the printout, and headed back to the Maintenance Hall. I sat down on my high stool, trying to puzzle it out.
Finally, I walked over to Baldur’s spaces and looked at his console. Then I turned it on. The standard directory appeared, with a few others listed—one being Maintenance. I accessed the Maintenance files. Everything seemed pretty organized except for one file, entitled “High Sinopol,” just at the bottom of the main directory. That wasn’t Baldur. So I punched it in, and instead of seeing whatever was filed, I got an almost blank screen with the notation, “Bazaar of Chance.”
The file or whatever had to be for me. I tried to rack my brain for the name of the casino, or what have you, and was debating whether I should just dive back there again—it wasn’t beyond my range—when the name popped into my head—Rafel’s. I punched it in, and I got the message.
LOKI
—
BY NOW YOU ARE TRYING TO TURN THE GUARD UPSIDE DOWN TRYING TO LOCATE ME. IF I HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL, YOU WON’T. EVEN IF YOU CAN, I WOULD ASK THAT YOU DON’T. I HAVE SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE GUARD, PERHAPS TOO LONG, AND IT IS TIME TO DO SOMETHING NEW, AND PERHAPS MORE CREATIVE.
YOU CAN LEARN STILL MORE FROM MAINTENANCE, AND YOU DO HAVE A GIFT FOR GETTING THINGS DONE. YOU ALSO HAVE THE CURSE OF NOT WORRYING ABOUT THE IMPACTS OF A SUCCESSFUL JOB. REMEMBER, SUCCESS CAN OFTEN BE MORE DANGEROUS THAN FAILURE, ESPECIALLY WITH BARBARIANS. THIS IS TRUE EVEN OF GODS. ODIN THOR WAS ONCE A GOD, DESPITE THE CURRENT JOKES ABOUT HIM, AND WHAT HE CREATED HAS DESTROYED HIM. KEEP THAT IN MIND WHEN YOUR TIME COMES.
There wasn’t a signature, but I didn’t need one. But why hadn’t he told me, only left a hidden message? I looked at the console, and another line blinked into place.

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