The Fires of Paratime

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  I'd spent some time with Verdis at the quarterly festi­vals, enough to get Loragerd upset, as I recalled, but Loragerd was uncharacteristically possessive for a Que­ryan. Verdis had been a complete cipher then. She still was.

  "Ready for something to eat?"

  "I don't go out for 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.

  She didn't. "Where?"

  "Demetros or Hera's. Take your pick."

  "Demetros."

  "Fine. I want to check the progress of Maintenance. I'll meet you there in twenty to twenty-five units. All right?"

  I presumed it was from her slight nod and headed out the arch and down the ramp.

  I was feeling paranoid, but becoming paranoid didn't mean that somebody wasn't out to get me. I'd left a few microsnoops lying around the Maintenance Hall, and I wanted to see what had happened in my first day away from my usual stomping grounds.

  Narcissus, Elene, and Brendan were plugging away industriously and kept at it. The area was clear, and my spaces looked untouched. The bin was fuller, but that was to be expected.

  Tiny as the snoops were, they were the best designs I'd been able to locate in a two-million-year range. Up-time Terran. The post-atomic Terrans left the rest of the low high-tech cultures so far behind in sneakiness it was un­believable. What was so amusing to me was that they be­lieved that they were totally straightforward.

  The time/locale I lifted the bugs from was at the front end of my fore-time range, a dive so far out it may only be a para-time, about sixty centuries forward. Sometimes, when I walked the streets of Washington or Denvra or Landan, I could feel the time change-winds whistling around me.

  There was an uncertainty about Terra that puzzled me, a conflict between what was and what might have been that almost invaded the undertime. Maybe it was the attitude of the Terrans, the fact that they held little or nothing sacred. Baldur said that none of their gods was perfect, and yet 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 barbarians who built sophisticated wooden ships with hand tools.

  "Why?" I'd asked.

  "So you can 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 damned near got split by a steel axe.

  Those fellows on the longships swung first, worried later, even when someone appeared out of nowhere. I'd blasted the axe, of course, but didn't zap the axe-wielder. He'd wanted to know who I was, even.

  So I'd told him.

  That was just typical of the Terrans. But it still didn't explain the uncertainty, or the continual change-winds that swirled across Terra, and Baldur hadn't said a word when I told him, not one. He'd rubbed an eyebrow.

  Change-winds usually meant the Guard, but according to Locator no one was working Terra. When I came back and pushed Baldur on it, he had brushed the question away. Sometimes, he hadn't wanted to explain or to answer my endless questions, and that had been one of those times. Either that or he hadn't had any explanation for the Terran uncertainty.

  The nifty little Terran snoops indicated that no one had been in the Hall but Heimdall. He had been there momen­tarily with Nicodemus and another trainee to deliver some space armor.

  I reset the gadgets with a magnifying waldo system. They're that small. Then I ambled through the Hall, ostensibly inspecting, but replacing them when I thought I wasn't being observed.

  That completed, I planet-slid out to Demetros.

  Early caveman best described the decor. The Inn com­prised a series of interlocking caverns, but each chamber was holed through the cliff-side and provided a gull's-eye view of the north coast breakers.

  I arrived before Verdis, despite my stop in Maintenance, and that fueled my suspicions further. Whom or what was she reporting to?

  One thing after another was piling up—Heimdall wan­dering around with deep space armor needing repairs, Kranos fronting for someone and shuffling supervisors, Frey and his secret fiddling with sun-tunnels several sea­sons, years, whatever, back.

  As I remembered that, I wondered if such subterranean maneuverings had always been part of the Guard and whether I'd just been blind to them.

  It was early enough that most tables at Demetros were vacant. I picked one on the shadowed side of the third cavern, far enough back from the edge to be dis­creet.

  Verdis came in, and 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 conspiracy.

  "Very discreet, Loki," she observed after she'd toured the entire Inn trying to locate me.

  "Didn't some wise type say that discretion was the better part of valor?"

  "Probably."

  She sat down in that 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 to say to her, with all my new-found concerns about wheels within wheels, I kept my mouth shut and hoped she'd dive in.

  I needn't have worried.

  "You've never had a contract, Loki, or shared quarters with anyone—the only Guard who hasn't. How come?"

  "Snooping in my records, Verdis?"

  She had the decency to blush, and it was becoming, per­haps because it showed a shyness I wasn't aware she had. The sudden change of color, the redness, climbed her like a wave, and receded as quickly. If I hadn't been watching, I might have missed it.

  "Are you really interested?"

  "I don't know. I would like an answer."

  "Never hit it off, I guess, not well enough to contract."

  "I find that hard to believe. Not even short-term?"

  "With my background ... " and I found myself telling her all about my parents, with their single life-contract, totally in love and totally faithful, so far as I knew, for I didn't know how many centuries. "And with that sort of example, anything short-term seems so—I don't know—why bother with a contract if it's not for a long while?"

  "You do make it difficult, don't you? Do your parents believe in a series of absolutes?"

  "Probably. They don't believe in the Guard, that's for sure." I went on to spill the story of my disappointments when I'd been accepted after my Test.

  "So you have to believe in the Guard and its traditions, don't you?"

  That was too stiff even for the best side of my better nature. "Do you always carve up people when they unbend and reveal a bit of themselves?"

  "Sorry."

  She didn't sound sorry, but more like she'd uncovered a rare and unusual species, someone who believed in the ideals of the Temporal Guard, as if no one did.

  All the Inns are self-service. And it was a fine time for a break from the Inquisition. I got up and strolled over to the synthesizer to pick out a grilled Atlantean fishray, whatever that was, and a beaker of firejuice. Verdis selected something from Gorratte and a dark ale from Terra.

  Finally, Verdis broke the silence.

  "Why do you accept all those impossible missions, espe­cially when you and Heimdall don't get along?"

  "Someone has to do them."

  That wasn't totally true.

  There was another long silence.

  "Loki, I think we'd better get back. It's getting late."

  That was it. I didn't go out to eat with Verdis for the rest of the time I was in Personnel.

  I stayed there for five days, and that was too long. I didn't get any new insights, just more aspects of the same questions, and there wasn't anything I could suggest to improve the place.

  Somehow, some way, something I had said had turned Verdis completely off. She wa
s friendly, but behind the pleasantness was a definite reserve.

  Gilmesh returned to his empire after the six-day period, and I went back down to Maintenance with a head full of unanswered questions, not knowing where to turn for information, feeling that all my communications with the Archives were being monitored by "them"—whoever "they" happened to be.

  I settled back into my space in the Maintenance Hall with a sigh of relief, however temporary it might be.

  XV

  There were never any alarms, no shrieking sirens, clanging bells. The Temporal Guard proceeded at a measured pace, with few exceptions. With an eternity to work in, the Tribunes could afford the luxury of planned action.

  Eternity was a relative term. Practically speaking, most Guard action was restricted to the past. I could manage time-diving not quite two million years back and about six thousand, a mere sixty centuries, forward. Odinthor was reputed to have had a range of two million years back-time and seven thousand fore-time.

  I glanced around the Assignments Hall. Besides Frey, Sammis and Nicodemus were sitting in the low stools on the platform around Heimdall's console.

  "Let's get on with it," groused Heimdall from the arch­way.

  Frey damped the slow-glass panels, darkening the room. A full-length holo flashed onto the wall screen. Simple real-time star plate. I studied it and couldn't see anything remarkable.

  "Sammis was scouting the fringes and came across this," Heimdall said as he climbed back into his high stool.

  Sammis was sitting against the back wall, his mouth set, expressionless.

  I waited.

  "Typical star plate," observed Heimdall. "What's im­portant is what's not there."

  He flicked a switch on the controls and another holo appeared beside the first one. They seemed similar, vir­tually the same shot, but there were differences.

  "Midway down, on the right," cut in Frey, trying to be helpful, but sounding officious.

  As it penetrated, I gasped.

  In the first holo, what Frey had called our attention to was a dark splotch, a nebula, dust cloud, some light-ab­sorbing phenomenon. In the second holo, the splotch was replaced by a brilliant star cluster.

  "You're implying that an entire cluster burned out in less than three thousand years. Is that so strange?" I couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

  Heimdall shut off his grin, glancing at Sammis. I noticed that Sammis's normally animated features were blank. I didn't see Wryan around either.

  "This next series shows a three-century span condensed into a few units. In getting these shots, Sammis lost Wryan."

  Heimdall may have said more, but I missed it.

  Wryan and Sammis? The long-contract pair? The legend? Broken by some catastrophe? Didn't seem pos­sible, not after all the time I'd spent with them. Wryan knew too much to be dead.

  I looked back at Sammis. Poor bastard, I thought.

  "Loki?" Heimdall's raspy voice brought me back to the wall screen.

  Heimdall didn't seem to care about Sammis, Wryan, just whatever was about to be displayed.

  I nodded sharply, throttling my anger. One day, one day, Heimdall would get his.

  The first two holos disappeared, to be replaced by a third. The globular cluster was still there, but dimmer. A pin-point star, or so it seemed, flashed bright-white, followed by another, and another, the chain leaping from sun to sun so quickly it looked like a white flame were racing through the cluster.

  As abruptly, the line of exploding suns halted. Deep in the center of the mass of live, dead, and dying stars, a white glow appeared, pulsing.

  The entire cluster erupted in brilliance and faded into a black smudge.

  "Sammis and Wryan made the fore-time holo first, then went real time into the cluster. Beyond the Guard's current fringe, you know," said Heimdall. "Cautious. Came out in deep space near a G-type star. But within two units of break-out, a warship fried Wryan. Sammis duck-dodged, made a few more shots as backup, and reported in."

  Heimdall undamped the slow-glass and pointed to the table across from him. "There's what he got on the ships."

  The hard-copy holos were laid out for me.

  For all my fiddling around back- and fore-time, I'd never seen anything resembling them. Shark ships, shining black in the space between systems, were caught in the act of destruction, destroying crippled ships of their own fleet, smaller ships of another type, blasting an empty moon. There were others—one frame of a purple planet under a normal yellow sun; a frame of a linked series of orbit fortresses, deserted, pitted and holed; a frame of a planet with a molten surface circled by an ancient and cratered moon. Destruction, fire—that was the theme.

  For a long time I sat at the table. No one said any­thing, not even Heimdall. I knew it was going to be messy, and long. I got up and walked out of Assignments as the silence drew itself out.

  As I walked down the ramp to Maintenance, for the first time I was face to face with an assignment that was geno­cide, pure and simple.

  The shark people were something else. Destroying an entire cluster, frying any loose suited bodies floating around, turning on their own crippled ships, melting down planetary surfaces. Charming bunch. And I hadn't even made their acquaintance yet.

  I was a coward, and ready to admit it. If there was an easy way to get the job done, I'd try it. Dead heroes were just that—dead.

  I cornered Brendan as soon as I got back into Mainte­nance. "I've been drafted as a hero. Going to take twenty, thirty days, if not longer. You've got it."

  I left him standing there flat-footed. He'd keep things running. I didn't have any doubts about that.

  The next step was to round up the equipment I needed. After lining it all up in the Guard's equipment room, I walked out of the Tower and slid home to the Aerie. The next morning was early enough for a reluctant hero.

  As I sat behind the permaglass, watching the sun set, everything seemed sort of empty, meaningless. Was I going to be assigned more and more difficult missions, year after year, until I was either dead or resigned from active diving? What was the purpose of it all?

  I sipped the firejuice and watched the night fall. In the end, I decided that the questions were just a way of telling myself I was scared, more of the unknown than the sharks.

  For all the fuss and furor of the afternoon before, only Sammis was at the Travel Hall the next morning as I suited up. He didn't say a word. But it was funny how he was always around, and on good terms with everyone.

  From the instant of mind-chill with the departure from the Tower, I was tense. Wryan was the first Immortal I'd known closely who had gotten zapped, and the holo shots Sammis had brought back had conveyed all too starkly the sheer destructiveness of the culture I was tracking.

  I had planned to back-time to the limit of my range, a good two million years back, and work forward; calculat­ing that it would reduce the risk factor. When a diver reached range limit, it felt like the paths and time branches were all curling back with a searing red-fire edging.

  I stopped as soon as I began to sense the curl, checked the time register, and my blood chilled. The read-out registered at a touch over a million, half of what my spinning mind insisted it should.

  The rest of the equipment registered normal. I passed it off as a peculiarity of the cluster and began my sliding around undertime looking for a likely shark-people planet.

  Dull—that was one word for it. Tiresome was another. Careful was the third. Close to a hundred thousand sys­tems in an unexplored cluster, and I was trying to find the one that would erupt into mayhem a million-plus years fore-time of my search.

  I kept track of my progress and got past sixty days without finding anything.

  It took work to be a coward. The rest of them all had the feeling they were invulnerable, but being Immortal has nothing to do with that. I was the one being called upon to stick my neck out, and I didn't like what I was finding.

  First, there wasn't any intelligent life on any of the
planets I checked. Second, I was blocked from going deeper in the back-time at half my normal range. I could usually glide to a million and a half, struggle past two million. In the shark cluster, I could barely get past a million years back-time, and that was with full effort.

  I had hunches, but I kept them inside. Maybe my whole approach was stupid, but I was scared. The more I looked, the more the pieces didn't add up.

  Item: A star cluster presumably destroyed by an intelligent race.

  Item: An intelligent race which destroys all other life on sight, and injured members of its own species.

  Item: A cluster in which time-diving is difficult.

  Item: A cluster which has large numbers of in­habitable planets with no intelligent life—a million years before the destructive species presumably emerges.

  The last item bothered me, really bothered me. All in­habitable planets, with exceptions too rare to consider, develop at least semi-intelligent life.

  For that reason alone, the surveillance boundaries of the Guard were limited to one sector of the galaxy. A substantial part of a galaxy is too much even for Im­mortals with the equivalent of instant travel. We forgot how big the universe was. I kept at it, though, and skip-scanned through one thousand-plus systems in ninety days, feeling proud until I realized it amounted to about one percent of the cluster.

  I spent another thirty-seven days skip-scanning before something clicked.

  It was a plain, seven-planet system, normal G-type sun, hard core inner planets, with two small gas giants further out. The life-detector showed the same low readings I'd been worrying about, but I sensed something different

  Planet number three had an aura, and I slid in, follow­ing the feel, the shading of time toward the ancient. The Tower of Immortals on Quest had that feeling, like the pyramids on Terra, and the Sacred Forge of the Goblins on Heaven IV.

  Planet three had that tinge, faintly.

  After tracing my strange feel to its strongest point, I set my own holopak for instant exposure and made a flash-through. I repaired to my staging planet to study what the holo showed.