The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  With the data he had already, it was a trivial calculation to compute his distance from the star, and once he knew his distance and position relative to the star, setting up the search parameters was almost too easy. He fed the numbers to the computers and ordered ship’s detection systems to start searching the toroidal ring of space that ought to contain Solace.

  Then it was time to let the machine do the rest of the work. He would get out of his pressure suit, freshen up, and get something to eat. With all the ship’s clocks reset to zero, he had no way of knowing if it had been a few months or a few millennia since he had last had a shower and a meal. However long it was, he knew he could use both right now.

  The familiar routine of stripping out of the pressure suit, bathing, and getting into fresh fatigues served to comfort Marquez. A hot meal helped as well. But all the comfort and familiarity in the universe could not have distracted him for long. The situation was too serious for that.

  He tried to force back his worries and take pleasure in his meal, but the puzzle of what had happened was too distracting. No matter how hard he tried to empty his mind and relax, the mystery of how his ship had gotten to where she was intruded.

  Marquez no longer doubted that this was the Solace system. Somehow, and he had no idea how, the Dom Pedro IV had guided herself here in spite of massive malfunctions, and in spite of missing the timeshaft worm-holes. Besides which, those massive malfunctions seemed to have healed themselves. Everything on board seemed to be working perfectly.

  But if the chronometers had all failed, then perhaps the navigation event log had gotten scrambled as well. Maybe the ship had, somehow, negotiated the timeshaft on her own, and then lost the record of the event.

  Marquez was heartened by the idea—more heartened, perhaps, than was sensible. If it was merely a question of the log recorder and ship chronometers misbehaving, then maybe everything was all right. Maybe the Dom Pedro IV was not only where she was supposed to be, but when she was supposed to be as well.

  A chime sounded, interrupting his thoughts. Marquez blinked and came back to himself. He looked down and saw that his meal was stone-cold, and virtually untouched.

  The chime sounded again, and he looked up at the closest status display.

  The detectors had found something. Marquez scooped the remains of his meal into the recycler chute and hurried back to main control.

  The visual-spectrum telescope had spotted Solace first, but even as he sat back down at the pilot’s station, the infrared scope and the radio-band detectors chimed in, announcing their own discovery of the planet.

  On a hunch, Marquez checked the planet’s ^position and projected forward motion against the DP-IVs current trajectory. It surprised him far less than it should have to find. his ship was on a highly precise near-miss intercept course with the planet, just right for dropping into a polar orbit.

  But there would be time enough to worry about the implications of that later.

  It was comforting at least to know the planet was there. Solace was not just his intended destination, it was a place he knew. He had been to Solace just six standard years before, and back then it had—

  With a start, Marquez realized it had not been six years before. He had no idea how long ago it had been. But now that he had a fix on the planet’s location, he had a way he could find out.

  Wormhole transit, long flight times, and relativistic time-dilation effects all render time measurement difficult during interstellar flight. For that reason, timeshaft ships were equipped to determine the precise time in a number of ways, ranging from measurement of the periodicity of calibrated neutron stars to the technique Marquez was about to use—planetary positional chronojnetry. He could treat the relative positions of the planets’ orbital position like the hands of some impossibly huge antique analog clock.

  Marquez instructed the ship’s navigation system to get position locks on the other planets of the system. Having a precise lock on Solace itself allowed the navigation system to zero in far more precisely and rapidly on the other planets. Within eight minutes, the nav system had a positive track on six planets, and that was enough for a precise chronology fix.

  Marquez looked toward the positional-calculation chronometer display just as the observational system completed its calculations and put the results up on the clock screen, numbers that placidly reported the time, the day, and the year.

  Marquez was vaguely surprised that he had no reaction to the numbers. Perhaps it was some aftereffect of being in long sleep. Perhaps he had subconsciously been expecting such news and had refused to consider it for that reason. Or perhaps his subconscious knew it was wise to keep him from reacting, because the only rational reaction would be unbridled panic.

  It did not matter. Nothing he could do would matter.

  Their flight plan had called for the Dom Pedro IV to arrive at Solace somewhere between two weeks and two months after her departure from Thor’s Realm.

  No matter what reaction Marquez summoned up, it would not change the fact that they had arrived at Solace almost precisely one hundred and twenty-seven years late.

  Marquez sat, motionless, for how long he could not say. It was the realization that he had no idea how long he had been there that brought him back to himself. He smiled without pleasure at the gallows humor of it all. He had already lost track of more than a century’s worth of time. It would hardly do to lose track of more time again quite so soon.

  You should have been prepared for this, he told himself. It is one of the risks of being a timeshaft -pilot. Well, that was true enough—up to a point. Every timeshaft pilot had nightmares about the temporal confinement failing to deactivate, or about the ship missing a waypoint wormhole or its destination star system and sailing past into the infinite void. There had been ships that had simply vanished, and many had no doubt suffered such fates.

  But this was different, somehow. This was no conventional doom. A disaster in space was not supposed to end with a ship that functioned perfectly, arriving at its intended destination with admirable precision, if not promptness. If your ship malfunctioned in the interstellar dark, then doom was supposed to be absolute and final. There was something downright disturbing about being only halfway doomed, of being marooned a mere 127 years in the future. That seemed too small a number, too reasonable a figure. It was absurd that such a knowable, imaginable length of time should cut him off from his. life every bit as much as a million years would do. It was not the sort of disaster a timeshaft pilot prepared himself to face.

  A mere century should have been as nothing to Marquez and his ship. The hull of the Dom Pedro IV was 8,362 standard self-chronological years old. A very few of her fittings had been salvaged from ships far older than that, though her interior appointments were of course but a few hundred self-chron years old, thanks to a refitting at a recent port of call.

  The Dom Pedro IV had entered service 432 objective years before the date now displayed on her positional-calculation chronometer, and Marquez prided himself on her relative modernity. Marquez himself was fifty-two bio-chron years of age. He had never bothered—or perhaps never dared—to keep track of his own self-chron age. However, by that measure, he was far older than his ship. But how could such a statement be meaningful, when both captain and ship had lived through the same few hundred years over and over again? He himself had piloted her on all of her journeys, having learned his craft on a dozen prior voyages on a half dozen other timeshaft ships.

  In terms of self-chronological time, Felipe Henrique Marquez was no doubt somewhat older than recorded human history. And that statement, while true, was so manifestly absurd that it did not bear thinking about. But he had lived that long, though he had spent 99 percent of the time in question in one form or another of suspended animation, and he had slept through the same few hundred years over and over again as the DP-IV had dropped down the timeshafts and then moved forward in time.

  And yet, for all of that, a short 127 years of normal, co
nventional time was more than enough to strand Marquez and his ship, cut him off from all links to his old life. For the years he had lived in for so long were now irretrievably lost to the past. The Chronologic Patrol would never let him go back.

  But then Marquez remembered something. Maybe there was hope. Maybe there was an answer, waiting, sleeping aboard his ship. The Dom Pedro IV was a cargo vessel. The main components of her cargo this time were Habitat Seeds and heavy-duty terraforming gear, along with various smaller items and a few luxury goods. She carried but a single passenger on this run. But that passenger had made a request before departure, and considering who that passenger was, the request was something close to an order in the present circumstances. In any event, it was a request

  Marquez would be happy to honor: In the event of any unusual event at arrival, Marquez was to wake that one passenger as soon as the ship was secure. Marquez had not thought much of it at the time, but now he did. Plainly, his passenger had entered cryosleep with the expectation of facing trouble at the other end.

  Marquez climbed up out of the pilot’s station and headed aft toward the compartment that held the cryo canister. The mere idea of talking to his passenger got him nervous. Before, departure, everyone had warned Marquez to treat his passenger with great respect, to be careful around him. All of the warnings had been completely unnecessary. He had heard more stories than one about the man.

  Everyone had heard stories about Anton Koffield.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Out of the Cold, into the Dark

  Rear Admiral Anton Koffield awoke from the frozen depths of cryosleep, his body and mind both seeming lost, cold, impossibly at a distance from Koffield himself, and from each other.

  His torso spasmed and his jaw clenched shut as his arms and legs strained futilely to shake and twitch. Anton Koffield’s body writhed in anguish, and yet it all seemed far off from him.

  Every part of his body felt as if it were no part of him at all. The agonies seemed to be happening elsewhere to someone other than Koffield; and yet for all of that they battered Koffield with pain.

  Even his own mind felt as if it were not his own. Someone other than Koffield was thinking the thoughts in his brain. He knew that was impossible, but impossibility seemed of little import. The weird detachment of thought and sensation seemed quite real enough, hallucinatory though it might be.

  His body had spent more than a century of ship’s time cooled down to temperatures that should have killed it instantly. The heroic measures required in order for the human body to survive such conditions were in and of themselves an all-but-unendurable punishment. Beyond that was the simple fact that he was awakening after decades of total sensory deprivation. It took at least a little time for the nerves to remember their long-disused routings and reorder themselves. It was inevitable that he would experience pain and disorientation as his body struggled to sort itself out. He had been through it all many times before, and knew that it would, sooner or later, pass.

  But mere understanding of the phenomenon offered little comfort as the uncontrollable paroxysms of agony swept over him and then vanished, only to return again and again. After a time, he came back to himself enough that the pain was unquestionably happening to hirriself, and to no one else, but there was no joy in claiming undisputed possession of his torment.

  There were stories about those who woke up and never had the pain fade. If it went on much longer, Koffield would start to believe he was of that number. It was as if his body sought death as an act of rebellion against the indignities it suffered in deep freeze. But the human spirit has too strong an instinct for survival to allow any such antics. The spasms gradually subsided into a perfectly ordinary case of violent shakes and shivers, the mortal anguish faded into mere pain, and his quaking limbs returned to some semblance of control. Koffield lay there, grimly waiting it out until his body recovered.

  It was starting to fade. That was the main thing. He was something like himself again, enough so that he realized how bad a shape he was in, how disoriented.

  Supposedly it was difficult for most people to judge the passage of time for a while after awakening from cryo-sleep. It was certainly true for Koffield. Hours, or seconds, or days might have passed since he had awakened. Had Captain Marquez been sitting there, in the revival control room, watching him, for endless hours, perhaps so long that he had gone off to other duties now and then? Or had it all taken but a few seconds?

  Such thoughts always went through Koffield’s mind when he woke up from cryo. But for some perverse reason, he had never made the trivial effort required to find out the answers, never asked how long it had taken to revive him. No revival operator had ever volunteered the information. Anton Koffield allowed himself few superstitions, but not asking about his own revival was one of them. Cryosleep was a close passage to death, and he had no desire to trifle with the rituals that had seen him through it so often in the past.

  Finally the last of the pain faded away to nothing more than aches and stiffness, and the spasms subsided completely. His body was his own again. Koffield let out a sigh of relief and unclenched his fists, not even aware until that moment that he had had them clenched in the first place.

  He risked opening his eyes, forcing the lids apart past the sleep grit and the last residue of cryosleep gel. There, above his head, were the blurry outlines of the revival chamber’s overhead bulkhead. It was real, solid. Once again, he had made it back. He knew the odds were good that one day he would not. But at least that day was not today. That in itself was something of a victory.

  He tried sitting up, moving slowly and carefully, and immediately regretted it. His muscles were not quite revived enough to manage much in the way of concerted effort. Koffield gritted his teeth and tried again, levering himself up onto his elbows and ignoring the blackness at the edge of his vision. A featureless blob moved through his field of vision and extruded a brownish-pink appendage that reached out behind Koffield and touched him, with the ten-derest of care, on the small of the back, providing just enough support to hold him upright.

  Koffield flinched back from the contact even as he felt gratitude for it. It hurt, it hurt like hell, but that was to be expected. Everything hurt after cryosleep. But whoever it was who was helping him to his trembling feet clearly knew that, and was touching him as little as possible while at the same time more or less holding him up.

  By sheer force of will, Koffield caused his knees to lock, his aching back to straighten, and his iron-stiff shoulders to pull themselves straight. The supporting hands let him go, but stayed close, in case Koffield collapsed under his own weight.

  Then it dawned on him. Weight. He had weight. He was not in zero gee. Being roused from cryosleep was an incredibly stressful business, made all the worse by putting stress on muscles and nerves that had gone unused for centuries of shiptime. It was, for that reason, standard operating procedure to waken cryosleep subjects in zero gravity, except in cases of emergency, when the several hours it often took to isolate the revival chamber from the ship’s grav system for zero-gee operations could not be spared.

  He had weight. He was, therefore, awakening to an emergency.

  “Wha—” he tried to say, but his voice with creaky with disuse, and his throat was suddenly raw. He coughed wretchedly and accepted a sip of the vile restorative drink offered by the helpful, half-seen blob-person holding him up.

  He forced a swallow of the stuff down with a grimace and found that his sight had begun to clear a bit. He could see the kindly, worried face of the man who was supporting him. It had to be Captain Marquez.

  He tried to speak again, with a bit more success. “What’s gone wrong?” he asked in a voice that was more croak than speech.

  “Something big, sir. You told me to awaken you first if something unexpected happened. It has.”

  “Are they here for me?” Koffield asked. No doubt they were. He had more than half expected it. They would have examined the preliminary data he had sent along via th
e Chrononaut VI. Assuming the C-VI and DP-IV had both stayed on schedule, the Chron-Six would have arrived about sixty days before the DP-IV. Plenty of time for the Solacians to go over his preliminary work. No doubt they would be here for him—either so as to seek further information—or to have him arrested and his information suppressed.

  But Marquez looked puzzled. “No one’s here. Why would anyone be here? Did you think someone would meet us?”

  “Yes,” Koffield said. It began to dawn on him that he had read the situation wrongly. “Obviously I’m making bad assumptions. What—what is the problem?”

  “There’s been a—ah, navigation problem.”

  “We haven’t reached Solace?”

  Marquez hesitated for a moment, clearly unhappy about what he had to say. He grimaced and shook his head. “I’ve checked it very carefully, sir. It’s definitely the Solace system. That part is all right.”

  “So what isn’t all right?”

  Marquez hesitated again. “It seems crazy, sir, but—well, I’ve checked every way I know how, and I keep getting the same data. We’ve arrived at Solace a hundred twenty-seven years late. I don’t think we ever went through a timeshaft.”

  Koffield swallowed and blinked again, and forced down all the denials and inane questions. Marquez was a superb pilot, and even the most hopelessly incompetent starpilot would be unlikely to confuse one planetary system with another. Marquez no doubt had his facts straight. Therefore, Anton Koffield would not allow himself the luxury of denial, of refusing to believe in something merely because it was unpleasant.

  Koffield reached out and took the beaker of restorative drink back from Marquez, and forced down another sip of the horrid stuff, as much to stall for time and collect his thoughts as to clear his throat. Calm. Marquez was looking to him for guidance. Better not to show any outward emotion at all, rather than give vent to the swirl of confusion and fear and postcryo disorientation. “One hundred twenty-seven years,” he said, recovering something like his normal low, thoughtful voice as he spoke. “That’s not good.”