Timegods' World (65 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy

BOOK: Timegods' World
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The catch was … it was free. Any adult Queryan could request those items as needed. He might need several friends to slide one home, and if someone wanted a bunch of items all the time, Domestic Affairs was likely to investigate.
Guards also often dived into other cultures in search of their own personal luxury items or tools. Technically, it was frowned upon, but the hierarchy didn’t seem to mind if the Guard was fully briefed and he or she could get it without notice or creating cultural change. Had to be that way with a headstrong bunch of divers, I supposed.
“ … you can see that leaves the Guard spread thin …”
“Thin” wasn’t the word for it. Roughly four thousand active Guards supporting the technology and culture of ten million. It almost didn’t seem possible, and I said so.
“Maybe it’s not,” retorted Verdis, “but we do it. Sometimes I wonder
whether the power grubbers and the egotists around understand it.”
“You don’t think Personnel is given enough credit for ensuring we have the right people in the right places, then?”
“Loki … don’t patronize me. I’ll never be the hotshot diver you are, and I’ll never understand why a gauntlet works. But I have to ask if you understand at all how fragile the system really is, how much depends on the Guard?”
“I understand.” I was irritated, irritated for some reason I couldn’t quite explain. “What I see is a stream of broken equipment that none of the divers understand, that few of them pay any attention to, and it all gets dumped on Maintenance. Every time we come up with something a little better, everyone wants it and abuses it, and the repairs get heavier. If I should get caught up, Heimdall or Freyda or Kranos invents a mission that is designed to fry or freeze someone and assigns it to me.
“And by the time I get done with that, there’s even more busted equipment stacked up—all waited for eagerly by a bunch of would-be heroes who don’t understand the difference between a screw and a bolt or an integrated circuit or …” I paused to catch my breath, but hurried on before she could interrupt.
“Now, maybe I don’t remember how important the Guard is, but no one on this planet, in or out of the Guard, can make much of anything. If you want to look at it honestly, we’re a bunch of parasites supported by a group of glorified thieves. We’re the thieves, and it’s a bit much to puff out our jumpsuits and tell the galaxy how important we are.”
Lorren was peering around the corner, mouth open as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Verdis had her mouth half-open, and her color had changed from what I’d call flushed to cold livid.
“I didn’t say the Guard wasn’t vital to Query. Sitting here and seeing how it’s all held together brings it home. But it doesn’t make us heroes. We pull down or change whole planetary systems and destroy peoples who might threaten our monopoly of time. We pride ourselves on slaving to pamper ten million Queryans who are handed the necessities of life on a silver platter. We discipline them with an iron hand, to ensure that the end justifies the means.”
Verdis rocked on her stool, ready to flare. I quit talking. I’d said way too much.
“How can you wear the black? You don’t really believe in the Guard. I think all you believe in is Loki, first, last, and always.”
“I don’t even believe in that. I don’t have the answers, and I’d like to know what comes next.”
She let out her breath with a hissing sound. “Next?”
“The present structure isn’t going to last forever. Have you noticed that we rattle around in this Tower?” I shrugged, waiting for a response.
Verdis shook her head slightly, and her mahogany hair slipped forward over her left shoulder. She didn’t seem quite as angry. “So what do you think comes next, Loki?”
“I don’t know. Assignments to fewer planets, more off-planet assignments per Guard; fewer local offices and more people thrown onto Hell? Have we already reduced the number of high-tech cultures within our range in order to keep control? I’d bet we have, but I don’t know how you’d prove it.”
“You’re paranoid.”
I smiled, hard as it was. “Probably, but it doesn’t have much to do with Personnel. So let’s skip it for now.” I wanted to, and wished I hadn’t blithered all over the place.
Verdis nodded slowly. She wouldn’t forget, and who knew who she’d tell? I wanted to kick myself in the ass. Instead, I changed the subject. “Now … have you considered a direct link of the Personnel computer to the Archives data banks?”
They hadn’t. It wasn’t surprising. I’d already gathered that little new programming had been done. I guessed that the original designers, whoever they had been, had kept the system simple to ensure its continuity.
“Why do you think so?” Verdis asked, with the emphasis on you.
“Because simple structures last longer. A centralized administrative and records system could be handled with a fraction of the people now used. But if it failed, I doubt anyone could rebuild it from scratch. Right now, the present system could almost work with stylus and permabond.”
I wouldn’t have been moderately amazed if the Tribunes had been quietly blocking too much computerization. But if that were the case, why had Kranos sent me to Personnel? Did he really want simplification from simpleminded Loki?
Wheels were turning. Wheels within wheels, and my formerly clear picture of Guard operations was definitely being muddied. Who had put Kranos up to the switches? Was it all to put the focus on trouble-making Loki while Gilmesh investigated Frey’s private empire?
“Verdis, I need to take a walk. Be back in a while.”
She just watched me go.
When I looked into Locator, Gilmesh was standing up, listening to Ferrin explain some facet of a Locator trace he probably already knew. They both broke off and looked at me politely as I plodded though the archway.
“Mastered Personnel already?” flicked out Gilmesh.
“Hardly,” I lied, since there wasn’t much else to master except the
evaluation process, and I knew about evaluations from writing them. “I just needed a break from the wealth of administrative detail.”
I was sounding dumber by the instant, and both Ferrin and Gilmesh were having trouble not shaking their heads. So I smiled, turned around, and left. Let them think what they would.
Verdis was staring at the wall when I returned. “Loki … I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” I smiled. “Ready for something to eat?”
“I don’t go out to lunch,” she answered.
“You don’t have a rough-edged Maintenance type fouling up your records all the time either. Let’s go.” I hoped she wouldn’t argue. I disliked arguing, even if I did too much.
“Where?” she asked softly.
“Demetros’s or Hera’s … take your pick.”
“Demetros’s.”
“I’d like to take a quick check in Maintenance. I’ll meet you there in twenty to twenty-five units. All right?”
I presumed the delay was fine from her slight nod. By the time I was headed out the arch and down the ramp, I was feeling paranoid, but becoming paranoid didn’t mean that someone wasn’t out to get me. I’d left a few microsnoops around the Maintenance Hall, and I wanted to see what had happened in my first day away.
They all fed into a storeroom, but what showed up wasn’t all that interesting. Narcissus, Brendan, and Elene had been plugging away industriously. The only surprise was that they were handling space armor. Most Guards use it very little.
The snoops were tiny, the best designs I’d been able to locate. The problem was that I’d had to build them from the design, rather than copy them, because they were uptime Terran. The post-atomic Terrans left the rest of the low high-tech cultures so far behind in sneakiness that it was unbelievable. What was most amusing to me was they believed that they were totally straightforward.
Their microcircuitry was almost as good as that of the old Ydrisians, but since it was uptime, we couldn’t copy it, and I certainly didn’t have the time or the skill to create much from scratch. The single snoop I’d built to copy had been bad enough.
Whether the Terrans got even better was, like the Ydrisians, in doubt, since they seemed to tread on the verge of blowing themselves away. In those few times when I walked the streets of Washington, or Denvra or Landan, I could feel the change winds whistling around me. There was always an uncertainty about Terra that seemed more extreme than in other foretime locales, a conflict between what was apparently
about to be and what might have been—a conflict that almost invaded the undertime.
Maybe it was the attitude of the Terrans, the fact that they held little or nothing sacred. Baldur had said that none of their gods were perfect, and yet that they required gods all the same.
Once, right after I got my gold-pointed star, Baldur had suggested I track one of the northern hemisphere’s Terran cultures, a bunch of apparent barbarians who built sophisticated wooden ships with hand tools.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“So you understand how much some cultures can do with so little.”
I’d understood that before I’d ever left on the tracking dive, but, just like on High Sinopol, I’d gotten too curious, and when I broke out I damned near got my skull split by a steel ax.
Those fellows on the longships swung first, worried later, even when someone appeared from nowhere. I’d blasted the ax, of course, but didn’t zap the ax-wielder. Typical Terran, he wanted to know who I was.
I told him, not that it would matter.
That incident was representative of the Terrans—attack, bow to superior force, apologize, and then try to find out enough to get you the next time. But it still didn’t explain the uncertainty or the continual change winds that swirled across the place. Baldur hadn’t said much when I told him. He’d rubbed an eyebrow.
Change winds usually meant the Guard, but according to Locator no one was working Terra, not after we’d taken a look at the level of normal violence in the society. It wasn’t a very safe place to be, and they had a lot of long-range personal weapons on even the safest streets.
Baldur hadn’t had much of an explanation for the uncertainty on Terra, but that uncertainty might be why the Terrans could end up better weaponeers than the Ydrisians. But the uncertainty was also why we couldn’t duplicate their equipment. Some places, like good stable Sertis, you could. Not Terra.
I shook my head. The nifty little Terran-derived snoops indicated that no outside Guards had been in the Hall but Heimdall. He and Nicodemus and a trainee had delivered the space armor and left.
My snooping completed, I planet-slid out to Demetros’s. “Early caveman” best described the decor. The inn was comprised of a series of interlocking caverns, but each chamber was holed through the cliffside and provided a gull’s-eye view of the north coast breakers.
I arrived before Verdis, despite my stop in Maintenance. I wondered if she were reporting to someone—but who?
I could see the actions—Heimdall finding space armor to repair; Kranos fronting for someone; Gilmesh investigating Frey’s domain while all eyes were on me; Frey and his efforts with the sun-tunnel years back—but I couldn’t see the pattern.
Had such subterranean maneuverings always been part of the Guard, and had I just been blind to them? Were Gilmesh and Kranos out to thwart the Heimdall-Frey collaboration? I’d just have to watch more closely.
I still had gotten to Demetros’s early enough that most tables were vacant. I picked one on the shadowed side of the third cavern, far enough back from the edge, but not in the deepest corner where everyone looked to see who was hiding there.
Verdis came in with an emotional swing to her step that indicated she was pleased about something. The way her body indicated her feelings, I had to ask myself if she could possibly be involved in any of the plottings. While I didn’t know her all that well, I doubted her ability to counterfeit her entire body posture.
“Very discreet, Loki,” she observed after she’d toured or studied most of the inn trying to locate me.
“Didn’t some wise type say that discretion was the better part of valor?”
“Probably.” She sat down in the earthy way that said she was all there, giving her hair a sort of settling-down shake as she eased into the low stool.
Wishing I knew what more to say to her, with all my new-found concerns about wheels within wheels, I kept my mouth shut and hoped she’d dive right in. I needn’t have worried.
“You’ve never had a contract, Loki, or shared quarters with anyone—just about the only Guard who hasn’t. How come?”
“Snooping in my records, Verdis?”
She had the decency to blush, and it was becoming, perhaps in that it showed a shyness I wasn’t aware she had. The sudden change of color, the redness, climbed her body like a wave and receded as quickly. If I hadn’t been watching, I might have missed it.
“Well …” and she actually left the sentence unfinished, the first time I’d seen her at a loss for words.
Was she really interested, or was another role in the offing?
“Are you really interested?” I asked.

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