The Fires of Paratime

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  I circled around to the other side of his table and leaned against a heavy wooden case with no apparent function. "At ten trainees a year or less, we're not exactly burning up this corner of the galaxy. Or replacing the giants of the past, like Odinthor or Ragnorak."

  Frey laughed. "With Guards like you, Loki, who needs the past? But then, with more Guards like you, the future wouldn't have a past."

  He chuckled so thoroughly I felt like shoving his light saber straight down his throat I didn't, instead slipping between him and his console screen as he reared back and continued howling over his joke.

  It wasn't that funny, but I smiled and slapped the snoop in place. "Anyway, think about it, would you?" I asked.

  "I'll talk it over with Heimdall."

  He'd talk anything over with Heimdall if it involved thought or words of more than two syllables.

  The days drifted by quietly, like the eye of a storm on Faffnir. I knew a storm was swirling around, unseen, but the more certain I was that something had to happen, the less actually did.

  After a couple of ten-days, I recovered my deep-spaced costume imitation of Frey and picked up all my snoops. With all the dodging I had done to get the one into Frey's console, I decided against deviousness and slid in and retrieved it along with the others.

  The next day, as I inspected the snoops, I discovered that not one had been damaged, tampered with, or even touched. Such miraculous good fortune alerted my cau­tionary feelings. Either I was way off base, or I was miss­ing something. What could I have missed?

  With no answer apparent, I began to run out the tape scans from the snoops, a chore tedious enough to keep me occupied for a while since I had to study each frame under the magnifiers of the miniwaldo setup.

  In the end, though, I identified the personal codes for Frey, Heimdall, Nicodemus, Verdis, Gilmesh, Athene, Loragerd, Ferrin, and a few trainees like Giron and Devindra. The biggest problem wasn't getting the codes, but figuring out which code belonged to whom.

  I'd placed all the snoops with decent focus on the console screens, but they were so small the peripheral scan was non-existent. I knew the code, but not necessarily the user.

  Some were simple enough. HML-10 had to be Heimdall, and FRY-27 had to be Frey. But who was XXF-13? And which Tribune was TRB-02?

  Another problem occurred to me. Did the Archives, or Quellin, the Archivist, track the personal code to the user's console? If so, I'd be a sitting duck using my own console. How could that be concealed? If I went up to the Archives, the cubicles were secluded enough for privacy. That would have to do.

  Midday had come and gone before I finished figuring out the codes. I was hungry. Brendan caught me as I left for refreshment.

  "What do you need?"

  "I'm having trouble with that generator, and the sche­matics all check. Won't run. Could you take a look?"

  "Be right there."

  Brendan trotted back to his table while I stuffed the personal code list into my thigh pocket.

  He was waiting, brightly expecting me to put it all to rights. All he needed was more confidence. "You can see. I've replaced all the fused circuits, rerouted the con­trol lines, matched all of it. But it doesn't work."

  From the first glance nothing seemed wrong, and I could understand his frustration. If all the circuits were correct, and I assumed for the moment that they were, what could be wrong?

  I began to laugh. "Brendan, think about it. What's the first thing you do when you repair a generator?"

  "Remove the ... " He blushed.

  "I didn't mean to laugh, but you went to all this work. And you thought you'd made some terrible and intricate mistake. You didn't. Just reconnect the intake field and see what happens."

  The generator worked. Brendan was torn between em­barrassment and pride. Embarrassment because he'd for­gotten a simple step, pride because he'd basically built the generator back up from scratch, and he'd done it right.

  "Good job," I told him. "Take a break, and for Time's sake, don't make a big deal about the intake field. We've all done it one time or another."

  I thought about it after he'd left and I was alone in my spaces. You could go through the most complicated procedures and forget the simplest and most vital things. Why did I want to find critical turning points of other cultures? Did the answer lie in high-tech cultures that might impinge on Query? The more I knew, the less I knew.

  That night, in my high and secure Aerie, as I watched the canyons and the eagles, everything seemed so small. I could walk the air between the peaks, catch thunderbolts from the skies without gauntlets, and stalk the storms. But I felt cramped.

  After the years as the nominal Maintenance supervisor, some unknown Guard or Counselor was making my Per­sonnel evaluations for me with my own personal code, and I hadn't said a tiling, just let it be. Heimdall was slowly building his personally loyal army of thugs, and even after they'd tried to kill me on Hell, I hadn't done a damned thing. But Patrice had told me I knew all I needed to know. I didn't think I did know enough. Why?

  For some reason, I'd been shuttled to Personnel. Why didn't anyone want me to know about the Personnel evaluation system?

  I'd been sent to record a holo of a gentle world culture's death. Without a background briefing. Why? Had Sammis had anything to do with it? On the other hand, I'd spent almost an objective year in tracking and destroying the shark cluster, and been given a totally free hand.

  Was the Guard winding down, like the mechanical toy I thought it was? Or was I seeing what I wanted to see?

  I went to sleep without coming up with any answers. Morning's arrival didn't provide them either. Deciding that more information was needed, and hating myself for thinking so, I ate and slid to the Tower.

  Baseline data came first, and I spent a portion of the morning, after I'd organized Brendan, Elene, and Nar­cissus, in one of the shielded booths in Archives.

  I plugged in Nicodemus's code for the question. "Has the number of trainees per century increased or decreased in the past million years?"

  "Increased." The figures followed. Summed up, the Archives data indicated that prior to one million a.t. the average number of trainees per century completing the first two years of training was three hundred. The cur­rent moving average was five hundred and thirty.

  I tried another tack. "Has the time-diving ability of the average trainee decreased over the same period?"

  "Negative ... subjective analysis of performance re­ports indicates substantial improvement."

  I'd spent thirty-plus years figuring the Guard was on the way out, and the damned data banks were saying the opposite. I had assumed that the business of tearing down high-tech cultures was to eliminate challenges to an ever-weakening Query. If the Guard and Query were getting stronger, why the increased destruction? Or was data being falsified or entered incorrectly?

  I asked another question. "What is the current number of active Temporal Guards?"

  The Guard including trainees numbered 2,156, with ap­proximately one million current and former living Guards.

  "One million!" I couldn't believe that.

  "Where are they?"

  998,000 resided on Query. Statistical probabilities indi­cated that 2,000 existed elsewhere.

  A bunch of things were beginning to nag at me. I was convinced the numbers didn't match. An average of four hundred new Guards a century over a million years totalled four million. Guards were supposedly Immortal. And what happened to three million Guards and former Guards? I was dumb enough to ask that one.

  "Former inquiry included trainees. Fifty percent of all trainees do not complete. Guard mortality/disappearance averages fifty percent."

  There it was, all tied up neat and nice. Trouble was, I didn't believe a single figure. I canceled out, asked for a total erasure, and walked back down to Maintenance.

  The Guard was bigger than it used to be? Why did we all rattle around in the Tower? What evidence did I have? When I had started in the Tower in Mainte
nance, there had been Baldur and Glammis. Now I was there, with Brendan, Elene, and Narcissus, and we were slated for one of the current trainees, a girl by the name of Dercia.

  I slammed my fist on the worktable so hard the slap echoed off the walls. Both Brendan and Narcissus were there before I knew it.

  "Are you all right?"

  I grinned, hard as it was. "Nothing. Just amazed at my own stupidity."

  They exchanged looks. "If there's anything we can do," said Brendan, "just let us know."

  They were gone. I vaguely wondered what had passed between the two of them, but it had been good-natured, and I let it pass.

  I'd tried to pass on Baldur's understanding and appre­ciation of the mechanical basis of cultures, but wasn't sure I'd gotten it across to Brendan, Narcissus, Elene, or the trainees I'd lectured. Compared to old silken-tongue Heim­dall or smooth Gilmesh, my halting lectures were probably as dry as centuries-old dust.

  Sammis had to have some answers. Time to look him up, if I could find him. Strangely, he was in the first place I looked, in the corner of the Assignments Hall. Why he spent so much time there I couldn't understand. He and Heimdall had little enough in common, but Heimdall did seem to listen when Sammis made a suggestion.

  "Loratini's, Loki?" he asked before I could open my mouth.

  Back we went to Loratini's, the Inn overlooking the Falls. Sammis started by picking out his food, even before we sat down at one of the individual balcony tables. I followed his example.

  Finally, I asked my question, the first of many, I hoped. "How big was the Guard when it started?"

  "Wasn't around then," he said with a half-smile, and noting my expression, went on, "but say I had been, just for speculation, I'd guess there were about one thousand in the original Guard and about twice that a million years ago. 'Course, in the first Guard, less than two hundred were divers, and even a million years ago, not everyone in the Tower was a diver."

  "Do you think divers today have different abilities than the older divers?"

  "Hard to say. Take you and me. You can dive a bit farther fore- and back-time than me. Not much, though. Big differences are that you can dive to and from about every different environment ever found, that you can carry a Hell of a load, and that you have some control of energy flows."

  "Does it make that much of a difference?"

  "Is a warrior who strides the thunderstorms and carries the fires of Hell more dangerous than a mere time-visitor?"

  "But why?"

  Sammis snorted. "A little knowledge is dangerous, Loki, and about how things work, you've got as little as anybody. Wait until you've got a few centuries under your belt."

  "Ummm ... ah," I began, tongue tied around itself, try­ing to straighten out the other questions I'd wanted to ask while I had the chance.

  "Enjoy your lunch, Loki. In your business, there's time enough to ask the questions later. You may never under­stand us, anyway."

  His eyes twinkled as he spoke. Sammis wouldn't say anything else, and when I was finished, he went wherever he was headed.

  The next day wasn't any better, nor the day after. Sammis, Patrice, everyone seemed to think I was dense for not seeing what was obvious, but I saw plenty—from Heim­dall's schemes to the toppling of intelligent cultures that were no threat, to Freyda's ambitiousness, to Frey's in­competence. What was I missing?

  On the third day after my meal with Sammis, with no more ideas than before, I headed back to Archives.

  I was getting too nervous, I knew, but I tucked a stun­ner into my jumpsuit. Thunderbolts were too permanent. I had decided exactly what I wanted, and that was a print­out of twenty cultures within the last million years that could be shifted up to high-tech or cultures which had been high-tech and reduced by the Guard's meddling. To that, I added the criterion of possible development of inter­stellar travel in some form or another.

  The Data Banks balked at the additional stipulation, end­ing up with some garbage that scripted, "no basis for evaluating particular isolated technological phenomena."

  That might make it harder for me to go ahead with my half-formed plans to end the monopoly on the stars, but I got the list of time/cultures, plus a smaller list of low-tech planets that offered long-shot possibilities and empty planets suitable for colonization. The three lists should cover all the bases.

  Twenty-plus cultures that should be out among the stars, and weren't. Ten that had been pulled out of time or star travel by the Guard. And the precedent I might have set in destroying an entire cluster. As I saw it, the trends were becoming critical.

  I just didn't know what it all meant, whether I was being pushed or imagining it all and overreacting. How could I know? Was it all in my mind?

  XVII

  Thinking about the best way to throw a monkey wrench in the machine led me to study the aftereffects. I didn't want to get caught in the act—or afterwards.

  That was why the Guard had such a hold on Query. Domestic Affairs/Locator could track down any Query an through the locator tags planted in our shoulders at birth. The exact composition of the tags was a secret closely held by the Tribunes.

  Not that I intended to let that stop me. I had the neces­sary equipment, and the lack of interest in things me­chanical among most Guards had to work in my favor. Who would consider a mechanical solution, or understand as I worked one out? Except for a few, most of the present Guard was composed of fumble-fingers. The few who weren't were mine, like Brendan, Narcissus, and Elene. Through it all and despite the abysmal level of technical understanding in the Guard, Maintenance was holding up its end, with all of Heimdall's efforts to pour repairs on us.

  To deal with the locator system, however, I needed an analysis of a functioning tag. That was the priority, and I got down to it. Setting up the heavy equipment scanner to pick up my own locator tag was the hard part, but I man­aged it by shorting out the safety access circuit and remov­ing one wall from the inspection chamber. Then I had to design a special shield to screen everything but the square of my shoulder blade where the tag was imbedded.

  Why didn't I get the parameters from the Locator sec­tion?

  The locator consoles are sealed, automatic, and the parameters are limited to the Tribunes. While Locator can track the signals and follow any Queryan, the composition of the signals is secret.

  Why didn't I take a blank tag from the maternity ward and analyze it? I did, and found out that the signal was a twisted helix, so to speak, and combined the basic temporal locator signal with the individual aura and sent it back in a scrambled pattern. The combination was set at random by the master locator computer by remote after the im­plantation at birth, and once set, remained set forever. That immutability worked in my favor, provided no one found out what I was doing.

  Repair facilities, even ones like the Guards', with the sophisticated air and light scrubbers, with superclean tech­nology, microcircuit duplicators, and the rest, have an atmosphere of grubbiness that no amount of cleaning can totally remove. In the Maintenance Hall, it wasn't so ap­parent at first, but after years I became aware of it, more of a feeling associated with technology than anything.

  A light meter would tell me that the Hall was as clean as Assignments, but the floor-to-ceiling slow-glass panels seemed dimmer. The rows and rows of equipment that I had reorganized, some of it under time protection and un­used for centuries, added to the impression of raw me­chanical power.

  I tried to picture a time when the Guard had employed all the equipment, but failed. Some of the bulkier pieces dated to cultures no longer accessible, a few back to the time of the Frost Giant/Twilight War. I caught myself from lapsing into belief in the legend which Wryan and Sammis had said was untrue. According to them, the equip­ment had been gathered, but never used. According to the myth, that had been the first, last, and only pitched battle fought by the Guard. I found it hard to understand how they could all coast through twenty thousand centuries on the memory of one war, particularly when it hadn't been
all that glorious.

  I shuddered at the self-deception embodied in that legend and looked back over the Hall. During the rearrangement, I had obtained the access keys to all the equipment. Heim­dall, like most Guards, failed to appreciate the power of the past and the strength of technology. I cut off the dreams and self-congratulations, knowing I was only postponing sticking myself under the modified analyzer because it was going to hurt.

  With a deep breath, I pushed my not quite totally shielded shoulder under the beam head and jabbed the stud. After I wiped the blood from my chin and slapped some heal-paste on the lip I had bitten through, I checked the analyzer data. There was enough, for which I was glad. I wasn't certain I could have gotten through it another time. I managed to smear some more of the paste on the burned shoulder and to cover the burn with a sterile field dressing in order to slip my jumpsuit back on. I knew the wound was sterile, but the pain marched across my shoul­der like a shark army might have. Sitting down on the operator's stool, I put the circuitry back in its normal patterns, although I doubted anyone would have under­stood the reasons for the change.

  I kept thinking of the Guard as an enormous clock, designed for eternity, but ever so slowly wearing down, missing an instant here, counting two units instead of one there, while the clockmaker's children and grandchildren kept oiling and polishing it, afraid to tinker or replace any of the millions of fine pieces within. I knew the Archives said the Guard was on the upswing, but I couldn't believe that data either.

  I debated leaving for the Aerie to let my shoulder re­cover, but decided not to wait and fed the data tapes into the master analyzer. The console screen was blank for what seemed like forever, though it was only several units be­fore a complicated formula appeared. I tucked the tape cubes into my belt and pulled my heavy red cloak over my jumpsuit.

  I strode up the ramps to the South Portal, hoping I could leave quietly as usual.

  For some reason—Heimdall's displeasure with me, my own introspectiveness, or my reputation for not suffering technological idiots—few of the Guards struck up conver­sations with me within the Tower itself. I suspected a com­bination of awe and fear.