"L. E. Modesitt - Timedivers -Timegods - 01 - The Fires of Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

THE FIRES OF PARATIME
By L.E.Modesitt

[?? apr 2002--scanned by BW-SciFi]
[14 apr 2002--proofed by WizWav]

I
Picture a man, or, if you will, a woman, standing in an empty room,
a plain hall lit by slow-glass panels and green glowstone floors.
The person standing there wears a black jumpsuit with a four-pointed
star on the left collar and wide silvered wristbands. The bands contain
microcircuitry.
Suddenly, the man, or, if you will, woman, is gone.
The slow-glass panels still light the hall.
Some time later-- a few units, a few days, rarely longer-- the traveler
reappears in the same spot and walks out of the hall.
That is all there is to it, the base action of the Temporal Guard at
Quest, the single city of the Immortals of Query, that hidden planet
circling a very ordinary yellow sun in a very ordinary galaxy.
There's no such thing as a race of time-divers, you say, Immortals
who ride the paths of time a million years or more, who manipulate
cultures in their corner of the galaxy?
Let us lay that question aside for a time.

II
Call me Loki. It's as good a name as any, better than most, and
besides, that's what my parents named me.
What better name for the grandson of Ragnorak, for the child of
fallen heroes, fumbler in the complex intrigues of the Immortals,
sometime god, time-diver, and idiot savant par excellence?
The dominoes of time have toppled, shoved into new patterns by the
winds of change, those chill winds that howl down the corridors of
time, those black rays of time-path tossed carelessly out by each sun
and vaulted and trod by the time-divers of Query in their ceaseless
efforts to maintain their precarious position on the top of time's
totem pole.
A too-florid description, perhaps, but accurate for all the
verbosity.
I am serious. Queryans are Immortal, but nature balanced it nicely
since the genetic interlock required for fertilization and the time-
diving ability kept births low--less than one per couple per
millennium. And accidents did happen, time-diving ability or not.
Queryan time-divers ranged through time, and since time is space, so
to speak, through space as well. As a precaution, all children were
locator-tagged at birth, although the talent didn't usually develop
until later, nor fully until puberty.
Only a few of us had innate navigational senses, and most Queryans
never went far from Query. Back-timing on Query itself is out. The Laws
of Time are inflexible. If you dive at all on Query, you dive planet-
clear.