Timegods' World (45 page)
Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy
IN A PARATIME reality, a being stands in front of flames.
Call the being an angel, for lack of a better term. His wings are silver and, folded behind him, dwarf his body. This angel is a student of the past, paradoxically, because he is not, yet is, and has no past. As he stands before the flames, he studies the wingless statue that is suspended in the midst of the fires.
The golden statue is of a god. Term him that, although his shape is mere humanoid, because as god he is casting a thunderbolt.
Set on the pedestal before the font is a tablet.
The angel-student-scholar turns his attention to the tablet, and his eyes widen as he recognizes the star chart.
A whisper of the change wind can be heard in the background, yet this is but a paratime reality, less than drifting smoke until the god acts.
Which god? That, too, waits for the change wind.
DEALING WITH TIME-DIVING season after season, and knowing you could be time-diving centuries later has a certain effect. It really doesn’t take too long for Guards to set themselves apart, even as we guarded the people of Query.
Field training showed some of that separation quickly. As part of field training, we were rotated through the various functional duties of the Guard, such as Weather Observation, local Guard duplicator offices, and Domestic Affairs, with a longer stint in the Locator section. Locator was the people-tracing aspect of the Guard.
Locator and Domestic Affairs are the two Guard functions not located in the Tower, not even in the wings. The Tower is out-of-time-phase, and few Queryans can slide or dive into or out of the Tower.
If there is a serious problem—violence or a missing child—time is important. The out-of-Tower location of the domestic Affairs and Locator offices speeded up the process.
Basically, in Locator four or five Guards sit on stools behind plain black consoles around an open stage, waiting for upset Queryans to appear and pour out their Locator problems … usually a missing child, a childish prank, and occasionally a missing parent.
Two or three of the Guards who sit and wait were trainees. That was how I found myself staring at a blank Locator screen one afternoon.
What a comedown it was—to spend the morning in advanced field dive training, diving into a nowhere between stars and trying to orient yourself enough to dive back to Query without using the homing equipment and then to find yourself spending all afternoon—or worse, late at night or after midnight—propped in front of a blank console … waiting, sometimes for nothing.
Sometimes not. Sometimes a child disappeared.
“Guard Loki!” called the woman, breaking into my afternoon reveries. She knew my name because it was on the desk name plate. “My daughter’s disappeared. I can’t trace her anywhere.”
“Her name?” I asked politely, because Gilmesh had pounded into my
head that Guards, especially trainees, were always to be polite.
head that Guards, especially trainees, were always to be polite.
“Kyra Dierdre.”
“Birth date?”
“Sixteen Jove 2,115,371.”
I keyed it all into the console, added the MC—minor child—code because she was only eleven, and came up with the Locator tag number. Then I punched in the seeker controls.
“Undertime!” flashed the console in its flowing script. It doesn’t really work that way, of course, because there’s no objective duration to a dive, but the machines are designed to indicate simultaneous “bridges” between different objective locations as “undertime.”
Even as I thought that, I tapped the studs and read the directions. Then I pressed the emergency buzzer so that Roggan, the duty supervisor, would know I was fast-tracking.
“One Red, South 34-337-45. EPB … Astarte.”
I fed the coordinates into the microcircuits of my wrist gauntlets and timedived right from my stool. For an eleven-year-old to have gotten that far meant talent, and talent meant trouble, which was where she was headed.
The Guard tried not to lose many, but such accidents were still the leading cause of death among children. Young children’s Locator tags were automatically monitored until they were ten for just that reason. Of course, Kyra had to be eleven, but that’s just sometimes the way things are.
If Kyra broke out on an airless planet, I’d have to be there for the pickup within a unit or two to prevent physical damage. If I couldn’t get to the breakout point in time, unless the child were unusually gifted, the results would be fatal.
I’d heard lots of talk about looping time to undo death, but you can’t do it. Dead is dead. The metaphysics of it consumes hundreds of pages of theory, but dead is dead. That was the hard part about going after place-strayed children. Sometimes we got there too late.
Rescuing Kyra was standard. Under the Time Laws I couldn’t make physical contact until after breakout, but I swept in behind her on a narrow time-branch that led to the airless moon called Astarte and followed her right to breakout. I came out right behind her, grabbed, and dived straight undertime. She barely had time for a gulp of vacuum or a chance to see the black ash and stars spilled across the sky like sugar.
Like an arrow I made for the Infirmary.
The medical technician looked up, almost bored, as we popped into view. His name was Hycretis.
“Vacuum burns, maybe,” I said quickly.
The girl struggled, and I realized I was still holding her tightly. I let go, ready to grab her if she tried to move, ready to dive if she attempted it. But she did neither, just stood there once she stepped away from me.
Hycretis stepped forward. He did smile at her. “We need to make sure your face and eyes aren’t hurt, and your lungs.”
“I’m fine.” Her voice teetered on the edge of tears.
“You probably are, but we’d like to check,” Hycretis added. “What’s your name?”
The blond-haired girl shook her head.
“Kyra,” I added.
Kyra glared at me. I didn’t know what to say. I’d just saved her from freezing solid, and she was glaring at me. So I stood there, waiting.
“Kyra,” Hycretis said, very gently, “I’d really like to make sure you don’t get sick.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes, if you exhale where there’s no air and it’s cold, it blisters the inside of your lungs. We can fix that right now, and it won’t take long, but if we wait, you’ll be a very sick young lady.”
“All right.” She didn’t look at me as she followed Hycretis.
I’d have to check back with him for the rest of the procedure after he finished, but, in the meantime, I couldn’t do anything in the Infirmary. So I made for the Locator stage and my console.
Roggan was talking with the mother when I popped out. Both of them looked at me.
“She’s all right. She broke out on Astarte—”
The mother paled.
“—but I got there in time. She’s getting a checkup and probably a quick turn under the regenerator to make sure there’s no lasting lung damage.”
Roggan let out his breath.
“When can I get her?” The woman’s voice was calm. Queryan stoicism—perhaps a touch of mist in her eyes, but no tears, no visible emotion.
“She’ll have to be debriefed before she can go home,” I said.
“What?”
“We don’t want it to happen again. We might not be so lucky the next time. She’s required to have additional cautionary instruction. Otherwise she might try a repeat.” I shifted my weight, wondering why I was explaining and not Roggan.
“How long before I should come back?”
“About two hundred units,” Roggan answered.
When the woman left, Roggan turned to me. “Why didn’t you give more of a warning?”
“I didn’t think I had much time. It was a long slide.”
“You’ll follow up with the cautionary procedures?”
I nodded.
“You’re clear, and covered.”
So I slid under the now and back to the Infirmary, where I walked in circles until Hycretis was done with Kyra.
Then I slid Kyra and myself to the training-center stage. We had to walk through the narrow stone archway. The training center wasn’t in the Tower either, but across the main square of Quest from it. The room we entered was out-of-time-phase, and I didn’t let go of Kyra’s arm until we were inside.
She tried to slide. Strong kid. She faded slightly, but that was all she could manage. Better than a lot of the Guard could do, and she was only eleven, with a lot of development yet to come.
“All right, Kyra. Take it easy.”
“Why?”
She had a good question, but at least I had the stock answer ready. “Because we don’t want you killing yourself. Because we don’t want you jumping to another airless moon … or worse.”
She did shudder as she recalled Astarte.
“Sit down.” I pointed to a comfortable stool facing the blank wall screen. She sat.
I punched the stud and triggered the series. Basically, it was similar to the briefing Gilmesh had given me the very first day of my own training, but worded more simply. Kyra had already received some of the material and would receive more under standard instruction within the next few years, whether or not she opted for the Test and the Guard. Most children don’t show real time-movement abilities until close to puberty—and it’s hard to get off Query without those abilities. They pick up planet-sliding by the time they can walk and talk coherently—sometimes earlier—which is why some Queryan homes with small children have inhibitors. An inhibitor field won’t stop an adult or older child, but the static patterns are enough to stop smaller children … most of them.
Kyra was caught by the screen. No great surprise, since a hypnotic field was focused on her to intensify the material. Standard hazard list was the basis—the dangers of suns, airless planets, black holes, blizzards, radiation. The briefing also pointed out that she couldn’t dive without concentration and discipline, so if she had gotten into a place where she was scared silly, she would have died because she couldn’t dive.
Simplified, but the Guard’s indoctrination series for wayward children laid it on thick—designed for the extraordinarily headstrong children whose will had outpaced the development of their rational facilities.
Some hundred fifty units later, I escorted Kyra back to Locator. She was a slim tall girl already, close to my shoulder in height, with piercing green eyes, a sharply pointed nose, and flowing blond hair. Before she turned to her mother, she fixed me with an absolutely black stare.
I stood there and took it, not really knowing what else to do. Finally, I smiled. She didn’t.
Then the two of them disappeared, presumably for home. I sat back down on my stool in front of the console and keyed her name into the records as a likely prospect for the Guard. While she might not pan out, anyone that strong at eleven was likely to be one hell of a diver in another five or ten years.
Just for the hell of it, sitting there and fiddling with the console, I accessed my own Locator tag. The screen began flashing a series of directions and locations, ending up with my own position in Locator, all the locations in the appropriately condensed codes, of course.
I blanked the screen and scratched my head.
The console had given several dozen backtime locations for me. I’d been there, but I wasn’t now. So how could the Guard locate a diver?
You couldn’t, at least not easily, not unless you knew all the previous assignments. Then it clicked. That was why Heimdall and Assignments were so insistent that we recorded the times of all previous dives as soon as we got back to the Travel Hall. And that was also probably why the Guard tried to instill the habit of diving out of the Hall and returning there.
Presumably the Locator and Assignment records were available to other senior Guard officials. That meant a quick cross-check would eliminate past assignments and enable a disciplinary or rescue team to zero in on the latest “real” location.
They’d have to be careful, and then some. They couldn’t pull a Guard out of a time-track he’d already established. It was funny in a way how the Guard could change a time-track not associated with Query, but could only reach a Queryan at the end of the time-trail—that is, the now.
That’s because of the Laws of Time. They preclude most would-be paradoxes. Only the strongest divers can break out even close to an earlier objective backtime dive of another diver. Most can’t.
I shook my head at the possible complexities of locating lost or strayed Guards and spent the rest of my duty tour waiting for another time- or place-lost child to track. It didn’t happen that time.
But it happened often enough. Children will be children, especially young ones. Without the automatic analyzers and the inhibitors, there would be a lot more lost and hurt children on Query.
And children don’t function on the same time frame as adults, not that it matters when Locator covers an entire planet. It’s always breakfast for someone when you’re ready for dinner, or the other way around.
That night I was tired, and I yawned. A senior Guard named Jaclynn was the supervisor, and she glared at me. It wasn’t effective, because her eyes were muddy brown, and, frankly, I was too tired to really care. Sammis had showed up that morning with a refresher course on fitness. I think the idea was more to demonstrate that he could wear us all out.
So I yawned and looked at the console. It blinked red—bright red—and I stopped yawning and fed the home and destination coordinates into my gauntlets.
“I’ve got it!” I yelled, and dropped right into the undertime. That was before most of the others had even finished reading the warning, but I was always quicker than most—except maybe Sammis, and that could be why he bothered me so much.
There was a four-year-old on the loose in the Sand Hills of Eastron, or close enough. I hadn’t learned the exact matches between the Locator coordinates and the geographical parallels, but I didn’t need them—just to follow the line to the child.
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