The Fires of Paratime

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  "Where's Wryan?" I was grasping at straws.

  "We'll be watching. It's a wide universe. Treat it kindly."

  He vanished as I watched. He was diving to Wryan.

  I shook my head to clear it. Duty, if I could call it that, would be to finish what I started before the change winds unleashed their all-too-long-thwarted fury on Query.

  I could not meddle with other cultures as devastatingly as I had on Sertis, on Altara IV, or the offshoot of Heaven IV. Time was short, its noose tightening.

  I had eleven tablets left I intended to deposit each on a different planet, each in one of the time/locales identified by the sundered Data Banks as promising for a high-tech development, knowing that my very appearance in a cloud of flame would spur something.

  Midgard was first, close-time, and I dropped the tablet on the ceremonial steps of the Asgard, thunderbolting the statue of the Serpent as I did.

  The other nine were a blur, and when I struggled across the bucking black time-paths to the last, Weindre, and forced my way into the Technarchial Center to deposit the last eternasteel tablet, I could hear the creaks in the warp of reality while still undertime.

  As another last gesture, I etched the black thunderbolt across the front of the Technarchate's Fountain of Power and placed the tablet under it

  For better or worse, the Guards' corner of the galaxy would not be the same. And no one would undo what I had done.

  Hell and Timefire! No Guard, no God, but Loki, could tread the paths of time in those instants against the wild change-winds. And next would I assure none would so tread after the winds passed and the worlds settled into their new histories.

  Some things I could not have avoided, no matter how I pretended, and some matters were not to be handled by stealth. Nor would I have had the appellation "coward" stand in the memory of those who cared.

  I broke-out in Assignments.

  Heimdall was absent

  "Loki!"

  Nicodemus reached for a stunner.

  I knocked it clear of his hand with a trickle of fire from the gauntlets. Not exactly, for I looked at my wrists, and the gauntlets were fused metal circling my lower forearms, mere metal decorations. I knew I no longer needed them, but I left them in place.

  "Where's Heimdall?"

  "Tribunes' spaces," answered Nicodemus.

  Before, always before, I had avoided the Tribunes' spaces, but power blocks or no, I did not intend to do so then, and I did not, smashing through the physical and para-time barriers as if they did not exist, hurling myself into the center of the once-sacred Tower.

  Heimdall, Eranas, Freyda, and Kranos stood around a black crystal table, waiting.

  "Greetings, fallen gods, and Heimdall, whom I shall call false god for the sake of convenience,"

  "Proud of yourself, Loki?" That was Kranos. He'd never understand.

  "The sons of the father's sons." That was Freyda.

  "Why?" demanded Eranas, in anguish, face twisted. He would never understand either.

  Heimdall didn't bother with words. He just pointed and fired. His aim was good, but it didn't matter. I let the energy sheet around me.

  I walked toward him, around the black crystal table, and he leveled another thunderbolt from his gauntlets at me. I gathered the energy to me and kept walking.

  I heard Freyda mutter, "Without gauntlets," and she was gone undertime. No matter, she would accept what came, not being one to fight the inevitable,

  Heimdall backed away.

  Kranos unfroze, jumped at me, so slowly he seemed poised in midair. I dropped under him and snapped his legs like toothpicks, broke his back with two hands. He fell in a heap and was as still as death.

  Eranas stood motionless, the blackness growing in his eyes, as I moved step by step toward Heimdall, who re­treated step by step until his back was against the time-protected wall.

  Heimdall, the honorable, the Counselor, the Guard who would be Tribune, turned the full power of his gauntlets upon me. And though I could feel the power sheeting around me, it was as nothing, and I took another step.

  As both gauntlets separately had failed to destroy me, he linked them together and blasted the thunderbolts of Hell toward my face. They flared past me as if they were no more than smoke, and in the slowness of that Now, I took another step toward the false god who would have been king of a battered galaxy. The universe has no gods, and while some have the power of gods, those who thought they were indeed were mad. As I had been mad.

  He lifted his hands to strike me, and with two fingers I crushed his wrist into powder.

  Heimdall, the once-mighty, the schemer, the demi-god who would have ruled gods and lifted himself, gasped once, gasped twice, squared his shoulders, and dropped his arms.

  "Do your worst, with your hands dripping blood and fire! Do your worst and feel righteous in your slaughter!"

  I broke his neck with a single blow.

  Silence.

  I took in the black room, the crystal table of time, for that was what it was, a tool of the Tribunes sheltered and used in secret.

  I stared at the black crystal, willed it to shatter, and it did, the falling shards themselves exploding into dust that was no more.

  Eranas, the failed, who looked and would not see, who saw and would not act, stood rooted in his own private forever Now, his vision locked into a universe that soon would never have been, blackness creeping over his soul.

  He, too, would die when the change-winds whistled around the Tower and stirred the silent dust of time, for his mind could not bear the weight of its own past.

  Some things I had to finish, and I slid straight for Freyda's mountain hideaway, the one overlooking Quest that had been in her family for millennia.

  As I broke-out of the undertime, the invincibility broke also, and I was scared, or sore afraid, as my former god-side might have said. I was sore afraid, for the changes I had wrought could have been far beyond my own con­ception. How small that conception was just began to dawn.

  Freyda was sitting on the hidden balcony, watching a hawk circle over the valley in the afternoon sun, sitting a bit too upright to be at as much ease as she meant to convey. She acknowledged my entry without turning, star­ing at the city below, still wearing her Tribune's black, star and all.

  "I assume that's you, Loki—god of fire, god of de­struction and madness."

  "You expected me."

  "Sooner or later. I was one of the few who didn't underestimate you. Gods take longer to grow up."

  I didn't correct her assessment of me as a god. For Freyda, in some ways, things were simple. Either I was a god, or I wasn't And I'd unconsciously accepted her frame of reference, until Sammis's questions, while somehow knowing it wasn't correct and fighting the simplistic defi­nition.

  But now the definitions didn't matter. The actions, my actions, mattered.

  "Why didn't you stop me then?"

  "Ten years ago it was too late to stop you. Your mother said it was too late to stop you when you were born. You don't think people didn't try? They just started too late—after you were born. The entire Guard couldn't have de­stroyed you after you returned from Hell. Sammis was convinced you went only as a penance. One way or an­other, with your birth, the Guard we knew was doomed."

  It might have been—only I hadn't known it. After all, up until a season before, I hadn't understood most of what I was doing. I told Freyda that.

  "Loki, don't you see? It didn't matter. If the Tribunes had strangled you at birth, the guilt would have rotted us from within, at least those of us who counted. If you had let yourself die on Hell, or if we had, no Guard would have ever trusted the Tribunes or Counselors again. And what about you, the real you? Have you ever really been forced to do what you didn't agree to?"

  "I'm sure I have," I answered, but Freyda didn't go on.

  The sun flashed through her hair, and the effect as she turned was the instant impression of silver, of age before her time, which disappeared even as I noted
it.

  "Sit down, young god. Sit down and watch the end of our era and the beginning of yours."

  I sat.

  "What's the insistence on the god business?" I protested. "I'm no god." I knew how she thought, but I had to try.

  "Oh, not in the theological sense, but with your powers of mind over matter, in practical terms it doesn't make much difference. You throw thunderbolts without bother­ing to use microcircuits, walk on air and water, heal your­self and probably others, destroy with a glance, go when and where you please regardless of the barriers raised against you, and you cast down and raise up whole planets and cultures."

  Her dark eyes pinned me where I sat.

  "Now. You define a god for me," she finished.

  What could I say that she would accept? Yes, I could do all that she described, all that she listed and more. But I was certainly not all-knowing, nor all-understanding, nor even all-powerful.

  "Then, I guess you'll have to call me a god."

  Her attitude made one decision, or sealed it for me. Living legends, particularly those reputed to be gods, never live up to their image. Now, I would have to follow, in my own way, the example of my parents, of Baldur, of Wryan, and strike out from Query, always treading the tight time-path of accepting my power along with my own limitations.

  Freyda turned full-face to me. "How does it feel to destroy the oldest institution in galactic history, Loki? Does it make you feel grand?"

  That was the first real bitterness I'd heard from Freyda.

  I shook my head, not caring if Freyda believed me or not, thinking more of Verdis, Loragerd, Narcissus, and the others who still believed in the shining destiny of a new Guard rising from the ashes of the old.

  The systems I had unshackled would not be put back in the ancient bottle of temporal restraint cast so long ago by the Triumvirate. I had seen to that. Yes, I had seen to that.

  Freyda, the last of the Tribunes, sat on the balcony of her retreat in the hills overlooking Quest and pointed to the City of Immortals.

  "Can't you feel it?"

  I glanced at Freyda, seated in her sculpted chair and gazing out at Quest from her protected terrace. So crisp she was, every white-blond hair in place, golden skin smoother than glowstone, black eyes glittering.

  "Can't you feel it?"

  The change-winds were boiling just under the horizon of Now, their black chill building.

  I nodded, and in that instant when the winds of time-change struck, everything went out of focus, from Freyda, the firs framing the view of Quest, to the Tower of Im­mortals rising from the central Square. And the wind of time howled; the icicles marched up my spine as I stood in the sun, the golden sun that hid behind the clouds that were not there; the very ground trembled; and black cracks in the fabric of the instant splintered across the sky.

  The histories, the might-have-beens, the was and the were, the is and the are, warred upon each other. Through the black windows of time hung in front of us, battles never fought were fought, all at once, all together, and the new turning points of history and para-history, of space and para-space, were hammered out in the fires of para-time.

  Freyda sat, her face frozen, for she did not see the windows of the brand-new past opening into the new Now.

  In one window, and I called it that, for what else could I call a vision of a past that was inscribing itself on the present as I watched, a ship swathed in light burst over the eastern horizon and streaked on a downward course toward Quest.

  From the central Square rose the Tower that glittered with the muted light of a thousand suns, soaring out of the perfect lawns and walks, out of the rows of scarlet fire-flowers. Before that first ship reached the city, the cool green air of that instant-past Query was wrenched apart with the sounds of a second ship. That one, tubular and black, somehow shrouded in darkness in full sunlight, drove at the city from out of the west, barely clearing the Bard-walls as it plunged toward Quest.

  I looked again at Freyda. She was motionless, staring at the City of Immortals, waiting to see the results of the mighty cataclysm she felt, but had no sight to watch, for the windows of time were closed to her.

  She did not see, for all her looking, for all her feeling. She did not turn as the ship of light unleashed lightnings at suddenly deserted streets.

  That vision did not happen in the Now, was only a pic­ture of what had transpired in a past we never knew, but was the past from henceforth.

  Under the light of the golden sun as it emerged from the clouds that never were, I was cold, not just from the chill of the change-winds that swept Query, for they had passed into the future, twisting and shaping it into new patterns.

  No. I was cold—and not just from the winds of change.

  I gazed, and beneath us on the plain that was suddenly filled with the rubble of old buildings still rose the Tower of Immortals. The remainder of Quest, a city razed around it, was jumbled humps and lumps.

  Yet around that wreckage wound the ways and walks of a wide park, and fireflowers bloomed. There was order, and there was power without the arrogance of the old Guard. Query still challenged time, but not to subdue others for the mere sake of conquest

  The Tower stood, as a memorial, as did the rubble, both reminders of a past that had needed change—and that had been changed.

  And while the dead, such as Heimdall, Eranas, and Kranos, were still dead, the others, Loragerd, Verdis, Nar­cissus, Brendan, would chart the new destiny of Query. They deserved that honor, and that challenge, and without my heavy hand.

  All that I knew, and though I could not say how, I accepted that knowledge, for I was of Query, and would always be so, in whatever corner of the universe I found myself.

  A question remained.

  Freyda and I stood on her balcony, a balcony changed slightly, but the same, and with the world changed around us, we were yet the same.

  "Us?" I asked.

  Freyda understood.

  "Because you made this present, this Now, you cannot be changed. If you were, it would not be. I suppose I am unchanged because you have willed it so, young god, or because of some other quirk of time, about which we know so little. That is both a gift and a curse."

  She smiled faintly, oh so faintly, and her smile said, "Goodbye."

  "What will you do in your new universe, young god?"

  I did not know, only understanding what I would not do. Understanding that I would not play god without ac­cepting the burdens and the responsibilities that went with it. Understanding, too, with bittersweet certainty, that I would fail at times to meet that commitment, and that even those with the power of gods can fail.

  I must make a final jump, a final slide across the skies of Query, to the Aerie, which remained, untouched. A thin layer of dust blanketed the glowstones, the empty rooms, as though I had left them long ago.

  Under Seneschal, I let the afternoon wane, the twilight rise around me for my last goodbye before I ventured forth into the galaxy I remade, out from Quest, out from Query. Out following all those who had left without the trumpets of fire I summoned, out after Baldur and his Terrans, out after Ayren Bly, out after my parents, out—the list was longer than I knew, with no real need to go on.

  The first star of night, the night before the dawn, appeared.

  Greetings, Baldur.

  Greetings, Wryan ... wherever you are.