Timediver's Dawn

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  I ran the Murian screwdriver, which had a triangular blade, over the surface. Again, nothing. Then I had another thought and pulled my own knife from my belt and drew it over the surface. It ran into a faint, barely detectable tackiness.

  I frowned. The Murians had forged what amounted to a lock. More important, they had established some sort of directional bonds that weren’t magnetic and which only operated in certain positions in certain directions. The duplicator could not have been lifted off that counter without destroying both duplicator and counter. The bolts had been there just to keep it from sliding around accidentally.

  Looking down at the eight-sided machine with its short glistening blue wire, I had the feeling my troubles were only beginning. After repacking the Murian tools into my belt pouch, I picked up the duplicator and staggered undertime.

  While it had taken me one straight dive to Muria from the Queryan Orbital station, it took three subjective days and twenty rest breaks to get back to camp, breaking out in the small work room Wryan shared with me. I carefully eased the duplicator onto a solid bench and turned around to see Wryan coming through the doorway.

  “You look like hell,” she observed.

  “Hell probably feels better.”

  “What did you bring back?”

  “A duplicator. If we can get it to work.”

  “Duplicator?”

  “It copies anything you put in the middle there—fish, fowl, or electronic components.”

  “How?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. But the only input is ship power.”

  “How much power? What kind? Alternating, direct, burst?”

  I shrugged again. “How would I know? I never even finished the Academy. It does take a lot of power. A whole lot. I could feel that when the Murians used it.”

  “Murians?”

  “Intelligent amphibian descended. Very cultured. Very advanced.”

  Wryan fingered the blue wiring. “Getting it to work could be a real problem. If this is the only power input, and it takes as much power as you say, we could be in trouble. And we’ll probably need two anyway.”

  “Took me everything I had to get one of them back here.”

  “Even if it is a duplicator, how can we duplicate it? We’ll need more than one.”

  My shoulders sagged. I hadn’t thought about that, but she was right.

  “Don’t worry about it now. I’m going to have to study this first, and I’ll probably need you to study one in operation to make sure we set this up right.”

  Since I didn’t exactly feel like dragging another one of the duplicators across the galaxy any time soon, and since I would have gone to hell for Wryan, I just nodded. “In a day or so.”

  She looked at me. “In a week or so. Maybe longer. You need some-thing to eat, and then some rest.” Her eyes radiated concern, and, tired as I was, I only wished that they had radiated more than just that.

  A thought struck me belatedly. “How did you know I was back?”

  “I just knew.”

  I wanted to pursue that but couldn’t figure out how, and besides, the room seemed shaky. I sat down on the bench.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She had an arm around me, helping me up. “You need something to eat. No blood sugar and no rest. Just lean on me.”

  So I did. Concern was better than nothing, if less than what I really wanted. We made it to the kitchen, and I slumped into a chair.

  “What about the duplicator?”

  “It can wait,” answered Wryan as she began pulling items from the cooler. “It can wait.”

  Lll

  FINDING THE DAMNED duplicator was just the beginning of my problems.

  “Sammis, this wire is superconductive.”

  I nodded as I munched through a half wedge of cheese. I never seemed to eat enough to keep me from running through my personal energy reserves.

  “At room temperature.” Wryan sipped something from a mug.

  “I’m not sure I understand.” As I looked up, I could see one of the new divers, Kerina, peer into the kitchen and withdraw. I could have checked by looking undertime, but didn’t bother.

  Wryan frowned. “Think about it. The duplicator takes enormous power. It all goes through this wire. That means that the wire and the insulation are both incredibly advanced. It also means that the duplicator is useless unless we can hook it to a power plant.”

  “We have several . . .”

  “Not designed for this. Do the Murians?”

  I nodded again, thinking about the ship generators. This time I was working on a chyst.

  “Do they come in parts? This duplicator is modular.” Wryan stood up and walked to the sink, where she rinsed out her mug and set it on the rack.

  After a mouthful of chyst, I answered. “I don’t know.”

  “We still may have some physicists left, Sammis. In a generation we won’t, even with . . .”

  “Translated loosely, if I don’t come up with a miniature fusion plant that we can build, or duplicate, we’re pretty much through.”

  Wryan smiled that sad smile. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “We do have an operating power plant.”

  “Yes. I’m not certain it will produce electrical power at the right frequencies for the duplicator. I don’t know if we could produce the proper transformers, rectifiers, whatever it might take to convert it.”

  I sighed and looked at the kitchen floor. Before long I could see myself having to lift most of the Murians’ technology, piece by piece, just because nothing matched and we no longer had the scientific expertise to make it match.

  “Fine. I’ll bring you back a fusion power plant. Except for the fuel. I’m not about to try that.”

  “My guess is that they use water.”

  “Water? Plain water?”

  “That won’t be the problem, Sammis.”

  “What will be?”

  “Getting the power to create the first fields.”

  At that point, I gave up trying to understand, at least for the moment, and decided to concentrate on the problem at hand.

  “Before I kill myself doing all this, Dr. Relorn, I want to strike a deal.”

  “Deal?” Wryan was clearly puzzled. “A deal?”

  “I don’t trust our dear colonel-general. Neither do you. So I want us to put together our first duplicator and fusion power plant complex someplace unknown to and unfindable by the good colonel-general. If it works, we’ll supply both to the timedivers, without revealing our hidden facility, and we’ll set up the second facility as if it were the first.”

  Wryan started grinning.

  “Why are you grinning like an idiot?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “Your deal was my next idea. I can even tell you what kind of location we need.”

  Wryan’s idea was simple. We would find a high mountain location, preferably on the Bardwalls of Eastron, where no one went even before the annexation, near a stream with enough force to power a small hydro turbine. Wryan was confident she could re-engineer, one way or another, the output to generate the mag bottle for a fusion system.

  “Only the mag bottle, you understand.”

  Sounded great.

  Reality, as usual, intruded.

  Right after we got the duplicator out of sight, I started hunting for a location. It only took us an afternoon to find the right place on the Bardwalls, a sheltered valley inaccessible except by a diver, with a southern exposure and even a set of caves we could, with only a little work, seal off for storage.

  I began scavenging doors and frames from the wreckage of Bremarlyn for the largest cave and cobbled together enough to keep any possible animal intruders away.

  Wryan began locating the equipment she needed, with what time she could spare from her work in administering, salvaging, and troubleshooting for the timedivers’ villages.

 
Within days, Odin Thor showed up at our official workroom in the divers’ village. He and his aide, a ninny called Verlin, who was nothing more than a directional guide for the good colonel-general, caught me actually working on planning out a phase of Odin Thor’s weapons’ scouting project, rather than ours. Once Deric had taught Odin Thor how to dive, within ten-days he had been replaced by Verlin.

  I was sitting at the cottage table trying to figure out my next series of time sweeps for mid and high-tech cultures along a spiral arm of the galaxy. Wryan had theorised that the high percentage of what she called second-generation stars argued for a greater probability of inhabited systems. What second-generation stars had to do with anything was beyond me, but if Wryan said so there was a good chance it was so.

  “Sammis! You promised us better weapons. Where are they?”

  I hadn’t really even had a chance to stand, not that I wanted to for Odin Thor, but, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I pushed my chair and waited for him to finish glaring. I was still holding the small ceramic tile I had been fingering as I had pondered where to begin the time-diving sweeps.

  “Colonel-General, I have already supplied tools. Gerloc and some of the other divers are providing new equipment. But there are only so many of us. I was to have three timedivers to help map the possible technical systems. All I have is Derika, because you said the equipment was more important.”

  Odin Thor opened his mouth.

  I held up my hand. “Let me explain. A star system lasts for millions of years. Not all systems have habitable planets. Those that are habitable are used for only a fraction of their physical lifespan. An even smaller number of those have high-technology civilisations, and those civilisations do not last long.”

  “But you can time-dive!”

  “Diving takes a fraction of an instant. That’s true. But,” I lied, “you know you cannot see real time from the undertime, and that means spending real time investigating each possibility. With just two time-divers, you cannot expect great progress in a mere few ten-days.”

  “You argue too much, Sammis. Former Trooper Sammis.”

  “Yes, Colonel-General. It is one of my faults, but I also do my best to produce. So let me.”

  Odin Thor knew that. So he glowered at me again and stomped out of the cottage kitchen. Verlin had not said a word, and he followed Odin Thor. The two of them stood by the vegetable garden that Tyra had planted and continued to cultivate. As they whispered to each other, it looked like a conspiracy, but it was only a discussion of where Odin Thor wanted to go next. He put his hand on Verlin’s shoulder, as if congratulating the fellow, and they disappeared into the undertime.

  I could sense the vortex. Odin Thor spent energy like water. That might be because he never felt what he was doing.

  I decided to see if I could catch Wryan before Odin Thor did. My first thought was our hidden operational centre in the Eastron mountains. I was so upset that I dropped undertime still holding on to the small ceramic tile I had been fingering.

  When I emerged near the waterfall on the Bardwalls, the tile was flashing with flecks of timelight or energy or something. I set it on the ground and stared at it. A thought at the back of my mind tickled at me, some memory of something, but I could not exactly recall what. I picked the tile back up and studied it. The energy flows were looped into the undertime somehow, and my fingers had a tendency to skitter off the surface.

  The tile was linked undertime, not totally either in or out of the now. Why hadn’t anything like that happened before? To me or to anyone else?

  Crack!

  The noise was an impact on the boulder. The tile was unscathed, but there was a dent in the granite.

  Plain old fired clay, wrapped into the undertime some way, was tougher than solid granite. If you could do that with stone or metal, what a building material you’d have. I could see it wouldn’t work for weapons, even knives, because the time flows had made the tile hard to hold.

  “Oh . . .” Then I remembered a long ago dream about a tower built with glittering stone. A real dive made half-asleep?

  I picked up a chunk of stone the size of my fist and dropped undertime, then popped back out. There was no change in the stone that I could see or sense.

  I sat down on the boulder to think.

  Was it the clay? I picked up the tile and went undertime, and popped back out. The glitter was gone, and I could tell the tile was a plain and ordinary tile again.

  I thought some more.

  “Sammis? What are you doing?” Wryan was standing almost at my shoulder. Like me, she was almost undetectable when she went undertime or emerged. Strange how we seemed able to find each other.

  “Thinking.”

  “Thinking? About Odin Thor?”

  “I was. Came here looking for you. Try to tell you about his latest complaint—but I got sidetracked.”

  “He caught me with Jerlyk, trying to develop a full-time hydro generator for the diver’s camp, enough to handle what we had in mind. If we were successful, we could always borrow it . . .”

  “We need two . . . just like the duplicators.”

  “Damn.” She shook her head. “You’re right.”

  “What did the great colonel-general say?”

  “We weren’t keeping up with the needs of the marines and the Guard, and you were becoming impossible.”

  I grinned for a moment. “I’m glad he thinks so highly of me.”

  “You are impossible.” She gave me a smile. “What sidetracked you?”

  I told her about the tile and showed her the gouge on the boulder.

  “Did you know you had the tile in your hand?”

  “Not the first time.”

  “What about the second?”

  As I saw where she was headed, I nodded. “But that won’t work. You’re implying that this time-protection only works if you aren’t conscious of it.”

  “Time-diving is mind over matter, Sammis. What you can carry with you is a function of your strength of will.”

  “So you think that if I dive and concentrate on not carrying something, I can duplicate the effect?”

  This time she was the one who shrugged.

  I tried it—and was too successful. The tile fell out of thin air onto a rock outcropping and shattered.

  Wryan tried it with one of the fragments and had similar results.

  Then I recalled the looping fields around the tile and picked up a fist-sized rock and tried to slide undertime and replicate the fields. Wryan was watching when I dropped back into the now.

  “It glitters a bit.”

  The once-dull stone shimmered, but the looping wasn’t strong enough and seemed to unravel as we watched. That effort was a start, another skill to practice, along with everything else we had to do. As for erecting a tower or a building . . . I was not sure how I was going to link two stones together at all, but I knew it could be done, and that I would do it.

  In the meantime, I still had to find a fusion power plant and another duplicator—and some weapons for Odin Thor before he got totally out of hand.

  “Sammis . . . now what?”

  I could feel myself grinning for no good reason at all. “We learn how to build buildings that are indestructible, duplicate the unduplicatable, steal the unstealable, and in general lay the foundation to become the gods of this corner of the galaxy.”

  Wryan gave me another one of those sad smiles. “Is that where we are headed?”

  I stopped grinning. “Is there any choice?”

  Neither one of us had much to say about that. So I left the rock fragment glittering on the ground, shot through with looped time energies, and slid undertime back to the cottage workroom, while Wryan went her way.

  Llll

  As USUAL, I ended up spending time on the wrong things. Instead of immediately looking for a way to get the Murian fusion plant or to find Odin Thor some weapons, I began wondering about time looping of materials.

  One of my goals was personal. If Wrya
n and I could build a retreat that was time-warp protected and could be entered only by diving, not even Odin Thor would have much success getting at us.

  So I spent most of the afternoon mentally playing with fields, trying to loop them around objects. One thing became clear. The composition of an object had less to do with the ease of time-warping than its mass. With one exception—nothing which contained electrical energy would stay warped out of time.

  I carried a small battery under the now, just next to the cottage workbench, and looping the fields went fine. When I dropped back into the now, the strands of time-loop sprayed away from the ceramic case like water off a hot skillet. Once in the now, they just wouldn’t stay looped.

  The other thing that became clear was that the fields reinforced each other. I put two time-warped rocks next to each other, and the fields I had created intertwined.

  Then I tried it by the brook with some mud. Mud? I didn’t have mortar to play with, and I wanted to see whether you could mortar together two time-linked objects.

  Yes . . . and no. I could attach the mud to the rock and loop it, or I could loop a bunch of mud and apply it. But I couldn’t use unlooped mud between two time-warped objects.

  My mud-slinging completed, I washed my hands in the brook and decided that, after I got something to eat, I would have to trudge back to Muria, or someplace, to find Odin Thor something vaguely resembling a destructive toy.

  What troubled me was not that I wouldn’t find it, but that I probably would. If it weren’t for the vague and uneasy understanding that the Frost Giants were still lurking somewhere in the undertime, I would have told Odin Thor where to put his weapons.

  The more we got into time-diving, the more likely they would be back, and we still didn’t have the faintest idea of how to stop them.

  So I dropped undertime for the cottage and some more to eat before heading back to Muria—or whenever.

  LIV

  THE PROBLEM WITH the energy pistol wasn’t what it did. It drilled large holes in solid rock, metal and sundry other substances. It also weighed half a stone. Amenda couldn’t even point it.

  Wryan suggested I look for something lighter. I did. There wasn’t.