The Fires of Paratime

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  With all that, I still could have dived clear, but clamped as I was to the black stone, I couldn't carry the whole mountain with me.

  Every so often—I couldn't keep track—a large night eagle would come screaming out of the scarlet night that was day and rip a hunk out of me. I didn't see much, not with the face mask protector, the partial helmet, throat guard, and extended breastplate.

  Not mercy, but practicality. The regeneration gear can't keep a body together if the eagles get the eyes, head, throat, or some large mess of guts.

  Strapped there to suffer as these lovely beasts and birds rip away, most victims have a tendency to scream. I did too, until I was too hoarse to continue. Some things I'm not proud about.

  Gravel-throated, whisper-voiced, unable to move, un­able to scream, unable to dive, a cold fire built within me, focused on the absolute injustice of Guard justice, and between the lapses of consciousness, between the stabs of pain as a scavenger rat nipped off a toe, snipped through an Achilles tendon, I concentrated on my future, my destiny ...

  If I had to strike, strike I would not until I wrenched bloody suns from their orbits ... by god, by Hell, by the eagles of night screamed and ripped, ripped and screamed. And screams from my dry throat merged with theirs and the blackness.

  XI

  I woke up in the Infirmary, alone, cellular-regeneration equipment attached to both arms and legs and with heavy wrapping around my all too tender mid-section.

  Glowstones and slow-glass, white panels and sunlight, all came out gray in my sight.

  I slipped back into sleep, and dreamed.

  A man in black, the black singlesuit of the Guards, and a man in red stood on mountaintops facing each other across a cloud-filled chasm. Gray clouds framed the scene; no sunlight intruded.

  The black man threw thunderbolt after thunderbolt at the red man, who never responded, never ducked, accepted each blast without moving, without effect.

  With each cast, the man in black laughed. Each laugh infused the clouds beneath his feet with a darkness, a growing ugliness. The clouds of darkness began to climb from the depths below, to tug at the feet of the man in red, who stood as if asleep, untouched, unmoving. But his eyes were open, unseeing.

  With a laugh that echoed through the gray skies, that shook the clouds until they trembled, the black figure leaned forward and released a last thunderbolt, terrible in its power, a yellow sword that shone with blackness, might­ier than all that had come before.

  The sound of the laugh reached the man in red and his eyes filled with knowledge, and, as they filled with under­standing, that last thunderbolt struck his shoulder, and he staggered, dropping to his knee, swaying on the mountain-top.

  Someone touched my shoulder, and I woke.

  Loragerd was sitting in the stool next to the high bed.

  I tried to croak something.

  "Not yet," she said softly, laying her hand on my fore­head.

  There was plenty I wanted to know. No Guard should lose consciousness so quickly on Hell. I couldn't say much, but Loragerd filled me in. The Guards who dragged me off to Hell had been Heimdall's friends and hadn't been espe­cially careful about the breastplates or throat guards.

  Eranas, crafty old schemer, had figured as much. He, Kranos, and Freyda had waited until the damage to me became apparent, recorded the scenario on holo, and rescued me.

  Evidence in hand, they'd held another Guard hearing, discharged the Guards involved, one of whom was my ferret-faced acquaintance, confiscated their equipment, and subjected them to that surgical procedure which insured they would never dive again.

  Underneath my cocoon of bandages, I shivered.

  The Tribunes had let me go to the point of death, de­stroyed the lives of Guards who disobeyed, and never made it public.

  I drifted back into sleep, half-exhausted, half-sweating, with Loragerd stroking my forehead.

  Four days dragged by before Hycretis let me out of the Infirmary. Baldur insisted I take another four before show­ing up in Maintenance.

  Surprisingly, the backlog wasn't bad.

  "That's because Baldur came over every night and whipped off a bunch of repairs," Brendan explained.

  In my absence, Brendan and Narcissus had been in a dive or die situation. Narcissus had done neither, just plodded along, polishing away.

  Brendan had dived, right into the business end of Main­tenance, and learned plenty on his own, though he was still strangely lacking confidence in his own abilities.

  Somehow, the backlog didn't seem quite so impressive, quite so overwhelming, not that I took it for granted or didn't keep whittling it down. A new perspective, I guessed.

  Some scars heal quickly; some do not. Heimdall had set me up. Foolproof. If I'd done as I'd been told and goofed, I would have been dead. If I'd fixed it properly, played it straight, then Heimdall would have delivered the message that he could dispatch me at any time.

  Heimdall got out of it with a slightly bruised arm, but two Guards who followed him were permanently disabled, and the only one who'd stood up to him was sent to Hell.

  The more I reflected, the angrier I got, but it wasn't the unthinking anger that had gotten me into the mess.

  I set myself the goal of mastering every piece of equip­ment in the entire Maintenance Hall—dating back to the Twilight/Frost Giant Wars. That would be one step, I decided.

  The second step would be more difficult, but I put some stock in the dream Loragerd had interrupted. I identified with the man in red. I needed to wake up, but that meant becoming vulnerable, and if I did, I needed to learn my own full capabilities.

  I petitioned Sammis to tutor me in everything he knew about hand-to-hand and weaponry.

  Sammis had been around awhile, just how long no one seemed to know. He had done the "attitude adjustment" course for trainees as well as the combat training. The basic hand-to-hand instruction had been where I'd dis­covered that I could half time-slide and speed my move­ments while staying in the "now."

  Sammis could detect that skill, I had discovered, much to my chagrin, while he could not do it himself.

  I hadn't believed him, and it had showed on my face.

  Sammis challenged me. "Go ahead. I'll stay put. Go on."

  I had been upset at being put down in front of Ferrin and Patrice, perhaps because they had done so well in the classroom stuff. I hadn't thought, just charged Sammis, sliding at the last instant and figuring to come out behind him.

  Instead of surprising him, my chin had arrived on his open palm. From that point, I had concentrated on the basics with Sammis.

  Now, with Heimdall waiting in the shadows to do me in if I gave him half a chance, I needed more than basics. I wanted everything he could give me.

  For once, I decided to do it formally. I went to Baldur and asked his permission to spend part of each day train­ing with Sammis to improve my skills.

  "No problem, and I'll enter it on your training record in the proper doublescript," Baldur said, almost kindly.

  I was confused.

  He smiled. "Loki, you're feeling that you've neglected something, and that you need more skills. Your work here is superb, and I think the Guard would benefit from your efforts to broaden your capabilities. Let's leave it at that."

  Sometimes Baldur left me with the feeling that he saw much more than he let on, but I didn't want to push it.

  He must have gotten to Sammis before I did, because Sammis said, "Of course"—with a catch.

  The catch was that he and Wryan worked as a team, and that as a team they would teach me. "Besides, it would take two or more to really force you to upgrade your skills," Sammis noted.

  Always the veiled hints, the messages within messages. I had never thought how many times this sort of informa­tion was passed in the Guard.

  Working with Sammis and Wryan, even for just a hun­dred units a day, was more pleasure than toil.

  Each of them sensed what the other was about to do and reacted.

 
One night at Hera's, Verdis told me that they predated Odinthor in the Guard. I hadn't thought that much about it, didn't have a chance to draw Verdis out because of the noise, and didn't get back to it.

  With my usual tactfulness, the next afternoon I broached the subject in what I thought was a suitably oblique manner.

  "Odinthor has been hanging around the Tower for cen­turies. When did he last take a diving mission?"

  Wryan screwed her elfin features into a wry grimace. Sammis stroked his chin and looked at the equipment room floor. Finally, he answered. "I couldn't rightly say, but I think the follow-up work to the Twilight/Frost Giant Wars."

  My jaw dropped open. Two million years back. "How ... his mind" ... I mean ... " I stammered.

  "Not that bad," commented Wryan. "Even when he started, he never had much of one."

  Sammis glared over at his partner.

  "You're older than Odinthor," I snapped at Sammis.

  "No." He grinned. "But she is."

  I looked at Wryan. Never would I have guessed it. With Freyda, and I knew Freyda was only a couple thousand years old, I could see the darkness of age behind the clear eyes.

  "You two are still taking missions."

  They glanced at each other, back at me.

  Wryan spoke next. "Who wants to sit around and let their mind rot in front of a useless fireplace or an unused console? Keep young by doing."

  "But—you could be Counselors, Tribunes ... "

  Dead silence. Sammis pointedly stared at the floor once more. Seemed embarrassed. Why did he seem so upset, shy, flustered?

  "Loki, you rush in, don't you?" Wryan asked gently, humorously, but her smile held a trace of sadness.

  "You two confuse me. My span is measured in tens of years, not hundreds of thousands, like yours."

  There was something I was missing, but damned if I could figure out what.

  "Perhaps we were," concluded Wryan briskly. "And now," she changed the subject, "you've got more to learn about knife-work."

  She and Sammis started buckling on protective armor. I stood there holding mine.

  Tribunes ... Sammis and Wryan ... when ... and then it hit: the Triumvirate! Odinthor and the two others, the first three Tribunes, with the other two the only Guards to strike down Odinthor.

  I started to strap on the armor, but my motions were slow because my thoughts were stirred up.

  Only Odinthor remained from that glorious time of great deeds, I'd thought, but there were three left, maybe more. If so, Sammis and Wryan had operated as a team for over twenty thousand centuries, incredible as it sounded.

  The legend was all I had to go on, because the Archives records of that period had been sealed by the Tribunes who had followed the Triumvirate. Why was unclear.

  According to the tales, the Triumvirate had created the structure of the Guard, with the Counselors and the three Tribunes, to fight the menace of the Frost Giants. More than half that early Guard had perished in the centuries-long battle, and in the end, entire systems had been reduced to molten slag.

  As I recalled the legends, I realized there was no real "afterwards." Nothing mentioned what had happened. The War was won, and life went on. We had won a glorious victory, right?

  I put down the armor. "I can't practice."

  Wryan looked at Sammis. He nodded. She smiled.

  "How about Loratini's?" she asked rhetorically.

  We stowed the armor and slid.

  I'd never been to Loratini's Inn, the oldest Inn on Query. You had to be invited to be welcome. Rumor was that no Counselors, Tribunes, or trainees were ever invited.

  An odd place, it seemed to me, with separate balconies for each table, with each balcony, maybe twenty in all, set in stone and overlooking the Falls. Officially the Falls were called Loratini Falls and had been well visited once upon a time.

  The three of us sat around the circular table. I had opted for firejuice. They had beers. Wryan's was dark, and Sammis's light.

  "What do you know about the Twilight Wars?" asked Wryan.

  "Only the legend. But when you said you'd been Tri­bunes, something clicked. And there was another question, too. I mean, there was no conclusion, no real ending to the legend."

  Sammis snorted.

  A pair, a real pair, they were, like a set of gauntlets per­fectly matched. Even looked alike. Both with the light brown hair, the faint, tiny lines close to the corners of their eyes, with pointed chins and elfin faces, though Sammis's features were a shade heavier. Wryan was physically bigger.

  Both had piercing green eyes, set off by even tans. All of us tanned easily and fairly darkly with a bronze cast.

  The more I thought about it, the more confusing it be­came. There I was, sitting with two people who I figured were former Tribunes, who'd controlled the entire Guard and who had given it up to work for millions of years at standard Guard assignments. Why? And why didn't anyone say anything?

  "Because," Wryan answered my unspoken question, "Odinthor is the only one left who knows the full story. Let's Just speculate, say it might have happened this way." I shifted my weight in the stool and listened.

  "Odinthor is the strongest diver—except for you—the Guard has ever had. Unfortunately, his morality is non­existent, and his directional senses were worse. Too much of the early Guard was tailored for him, from the elaborate directional aides in the wrist gauntlets to special homing beacons, because he was the only diver strong enough at first to break the para-time barriers of the Frost Giants. But let's guess a little more about the Twilight War and add a bit to the story, remembering that it's only a story."

  Wryan paused, and Sammis continued where she had left off even though a word had not passed between them.

  "Believe it or not, the War created the Guard."

  The War started when parts of Query started freezing solid, instantaneously, according to the legend.

  " ... but none of the divers could get close to the Giants. As the Giants traveled through space and time, they warped the time around themselves and sustained them­selves with that energy. The backlash was the freezings. The first problem was to find the home or base of the Giants ... "

  Sammis kept talking, and I found myself being drawn into the story.

  I wasn't sure I should believe any of it.

  The Frost Giants stood only a head or so taller than the tallest Queryans and were not giants in any real sense, though they had four arms and considerably more mass.

  The Frost Giants demonstrated another adaptation of the time-diving talent, noted Wryan as she took up the tale. While they had definite range limits, a Giant could time-dive to any point in the galaxy which existed during his or her or its own objective life. Giants seemed to have lived several millennia.

  I hadn't asked for a dissertation on the Frost Giants, but remembering my training thrashings from Sammis I decided to let them make their point in whatever obscure fashion pleased them.

  Giants went through two phases. In childhood they were planet-bound until they physically matured, had children, and then became fully adult. Adults gained the ability to time-dive and place-slide. If the maturing "child" did not inherit the talent, he, she, or it died of old age within the century.

  In maturity, the Frost Giants needed no gross physical food, but absorbed the heat energy around them with each dive. How they "drank" it without burning themselves up, none of the Queryan scientists could figure out.

  "Yes, we had scientists," explained Wryan.

  The more the explanations went on, the more confused I got.

  "The Frost Giants were big, and when they matured, if they matured, they could time-dive, and when they dived they fed and took all the heat energy from where they dived, which left some planet or locale with a frozen chunk. Is that the idea?" I asked.

  Sammis nodded and kept talking.

  At that time, time-diving was a talent still new to Query, not more than a thousand years since it had first popped up.

  Queryan spaceships had
investigated and placed bases on the two other closest system planets, and the scientific com­munity was hoping for a break-through on a faster than light drive.

  The first awareness of the Frost Giants came when half the base on Thoses was frozen solid.

  Wryan took over the story and summarized the sum­mary.

  The Queryan planetary government, really a titular mon­archy—whatever that was, I thought—had sent an expedi­tion out to Thoses to investigate—and found nothing.

  In the meantime, the base on Mithrada, the innermost system planet and the one next toward the sun from Query, had begun reporting abnormal temperature drops all over Mithrada.

  Some bright scientist suggested programming all the loca­tions into a computer, which was promptly done, to see if the results could be used to predict new occurrences. Some military type, having too much gusto, decided that it wouldn't hurt to lob a thermonuclear weapon into one of the predicted probability areas, provided it was unsuitable for anything else. The "experiment" was a great success, and from the results, potted a Frost Giant.

  At which point, the military headquarters on Query was frozen solid with the High Command still inside.

  The longer the story got, the more questions I had.

  At the same time, interjected Sammis, the Government Time Research Laboratory, under the direction of Dr. Wryan Relorn, had been employing the few hundred really good time-divers to scout out possible interstellar colonies—since it was obvious the majority of the Queryan people could not travel in time or use the ability to move in space.

  Dr. Relorn theorized that the ability to time-dive was in­herent in most Queryans, but because of the special limitations of the relatively inflexible Laws of Time, they didn't realize their potential, or thought they were hallucinating.

  "None of this is in the Archives," I tried to point out reasonably.

  "Let's just keep calling it a story," said Wryan, "just a made-up story."

  "All right. But we've got Frost Giants freezing chunks of Query because somebody bombed one of them and a few scattered time-divers under a nutty doctor ... "

  "She's not that nutty," said Sammis quietly.