The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Perhaps so, sir. But you still haven’t told me anything.”

  Koffield. laughed, and there was even something careful and reserved about the way he laughed. “You don’t miss much, you know how to put the pieces together, and you’re damned persistent. Those are good traits to have, Officer Chandray. They’ll serve you well.”

  “Well, sir, I’d like it if that started happening right now. Talk to me. What’s going on? What is the big picture? What is this all about?”

  Koffield sank back on the couch, rubbed his face with his hands, and let out a sigh. When his hands came down from his face, it seemed almost as if he had peeled away a mask. Suddenly the weariness showed, and the worry, and the anxiety. He was letting her see. “What’s it about?” he asked, echoing her words. “Disaster. Long-range, fullblown disaster for our entire civilization—and our species as well, for that matter.”

  Her eyes widened, and she stared at him. His tone of voice, his expression, made it impossible not to believe Koffield. He wasn’t spouting hyperbole that made him feel big and important. He was speaking the truth. That it had taken so much effort to drag it out of him only made him seem more convincing. He meant what he said.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Koffield stared at her for a moment, and then, at last, nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right.” He stood up and paced back and forth a time or two across the wardroom-lounge area. “It’s hard to know where to start,” he said. He paused and looked out the wardroom porthole. “After not speaking for so long, it’s hard to start at all,” he admitted.

  He stared out at the cold stars for a long time, his thoughts seemingly as. far from Nor la as the stars themselves. Suddenly he turned toward her and spoke. “I suppose the best way to explain it to you is to explain how I got involved,” he said. “I expect you know—-you know what happened—what I did—at the Circum Central Wormhole Farm?

  “In general terms,” she said. I don’t know every detail.” I know they curse your name at Glister, and the mere fact that the Chronologic Patrol approved your actions was enough that, before the collapse came, Glister’s government ordered all Patrol facilities in the system closed, and ejected the entire Patrol contingent, she thought. They’ll never trust the Patrol, or any outsiders, again. But was that true? Never was a long time—and the incident was now a century and more in the past. What was Koffield to Glister now, today? A name that rated a footnote in the history books, or still a monster whose name would echo down the ages? “I—I suppose I know as much as I need to know.”

  “Hmmmph. You might—or might not—need to know a great deal more about it in future. But that’s to one side. Circum Central is not what I want to talk about now.”

  Or ever, Norla added silently. If that blood were on her hands, she would not want to talk about it. “Go on, sir,” she said.

  Koffield sighed, turned his back on the porthole, leaned up against the outside bulkhead, and folded his arms wearily. “The Circum Central Incident. That’s what it ended up being called, for the most part. I will tell you it in brief. Some of what I’ll tell you I knew at the time, and some of it I knew later. I’ll tell it as short and clean as I can. There was a standard defense arrangement on the time-shaft wormhole. One ship, the Standfast, on the past, or downtime, side of the singularity. Another ship, mine, the Upholder, that had transited from the downtime side, to the future, or uptime, side of the wormhole. The Standfast was jumped by thirty-two uncrewed intruder ships that seemed to come out of nowhere, and maneuvered and accelerated at very high rates. Sixteen of the intruders were decoys, meant to occupy the Standfast while the others got through the wormhole. The Standfast was destroyed while killing most of the sixteen intruders that were trying for the wormhole. Six of the sixteen got through—how, no one knows. The codes and control systems were supposed to be completely unbreakable.

  “My ship, the Upholder, killed three of those six intruders, and was severely damaged in the process. I—we—lost six of our crew. The other three intruders escaped, and seemed—I emphasize that word—seemed—to accelerate to and past light-speed as they did so.

  “Two relief ships—the Guardian and the Watchkeeper— arrived at the downtime end of the wormhole, and sent an extremely minimal signal to my ship, the Upholder, to report their arrival. I mistakenly assumed that only one relief ship would come from downtime, while the other would arrive from the uptime end. Once I destroyed the wormhole, of course, there was no point in sending any sort of relief craft, from past or future, to the uptime end of Circum Central. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  “The original plan had been to send the Watchkeeper through the wormhole to the uptime side while the Guardian remained on the downtime end. However, before the Guardian could rig for duty stations or the Watchkeeper could revive her crew and make the wormhole run, a new crisis erupted.

  “Sometime after the first intruder assault, a convoy of five ships filled with relief supplies and bound for Glister came in on a standard approach toward the uptime end of the wormhole. Just as they were commencing final approach, six of the vehicles that came to be called Intruders with a capital T entered the system as well. Three tried to ram the Upholder and so destroyed themselves. We destroyed two Intruders before they could reach the wormhole. The third was destroyed inside the wormhole as the wormhole nexus shut down with the ship inside.

  “Once the wormhole was destroyed, and it was clear that no relief would be coming, I decided to head for home. The Upholder traveled back to the Solar System, using other timeshafts so as to arrive without getting thrown farther out of our own time. The ship was not in good condition even before we started the trip. Suffice it to say it was not a pleasant journey.”

  Koffield stopped talking and stared, unseeing, out across the compartment, at some dark and quiet place beyond. Norla had read enough about the Circum Central Incident to know that the return voyage of the Upholder was a saga in and of itself. She did not speak and waited for Koffield to start again. At last he did, but said no more about the Upholder’s return.

  “One ship of the convoy, the Herakles IX, got through the wormhole. Three were torn apart by the singularity as they attempted to abort their approach. The fifth and last of the convoy ships, the Stardrifter Gamma, aborted successfully and left—or perhaps, or more accurately, escaped— Circum Central immediately, to be marooned on the uptime side of the wormhole. Merchanter’s law puts priority on reporting an incident over delivering cargo eighty years late. The Stardrifter Gamma limped to Trior’s Realm Wormhole Farm and reported what she had seen.

  “However, Merchanter’s law and Chronologic Patrol rules place defending chronology above anything else. That meant that the ship that made it through the wormhole could not report on the events she had seen until the events had in fact happened. As is and was standard procedure, only the captain of the Herakles IX had been revived for the pass through the wormhole. The rest of the crew had slept through the whole affair. But the captain, and the ship’s data-recording instruments, had seen a great deal in the future. The Chronologic Patrol had to do two things. First, the Patrol had to prevent any description of the incident from getting out before the time in the future when it had happened. No one, not even the Patrol, could be allowed to learn more about Circum Central, before the incident took place. Second, the Patrol had to secure that information and get it to Patrol Headquarters as soon as possible after that moment had passed.

  “Because the wormhole had been destroyed, the Watch-keeper could no longer transit through it to relieve my ship. She was, therefore, sent in pursuit of the Herakles IX in order to accomplish those goals. As is normally the case with a timeshaft ship’s flight plan, it had been arranged so that the ship would arrive at her destination some month or two after her original departure. Thus, she was a month or two out from Glister when she reached her original departure date, and about forty years downtime, in the past, of the Circum Central Incident.

  “A prize crew
from the Watch keeper boarded the H-IX before the captain came out of temporal confinement, took him into custody, and did a full data download of everything in the ship’s computer and Artlnt system. Then the prize crew wiped the snip’s memories clean of everything that had happened after her arrival at Circum Central. They put the data and the captain in a temporal-containment unit and sealed them in. Once everything was impounded and erased, they revived the first officer, informed him that the captain and the data had been unintentionally involved in a ‘time-displacement incident,’ and left the first officer to bring her ship in to Glister as best she could. For what it’s worth, the H-IX arrived safely, though without a captain, and with her operational logs blanked out.”

  “Almost sounds like what happened to us,” said Norla.

  Koffield frowned in surprise. “So it does. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it.”

  “Is that what happened, do you think? Did the Dom Pedro IV accidentally witness something? Did her instruments record something that forced the Chronologic Patrol to board her, blank her memories, and target her toward Solace without a timeshaft transition?”

  Koffield shook his head. “It’s possible, I suppose. I’ll have to think about that one—but somehow, it doesn’t quite feel right. It’s not the way the Patrol does business. They don’t like creating any more mystery than necessary. They leave a message, or make a statement, when they intervene. They made it clear to the H-JX’s first officer that the ship and the captain had broken no law, committed no crime, but were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They do that to keep people from speculating and inventing conspiracies. If they hadn’t said something to the first officer, then everyone in Settled Space would have spent the next forty years dragging the captain’s name through the mud.”

  The way they’ve dragged yours, Norla thought. But best not to explore that area, just at the moment. “So what happened next?” she asked. “To the captain and the data.”

  “Well, they were in the temporal-confinement unit aboard the Watchkeeper. Think it through, and you’ll see that, by chasing the Herakles IX, the Watchkeeper had marooned herself forty years into her own future. She couldn’t go back. But her captain didn’t want to go any farther forward either. Not if he could help it. He plotted a standard timeshaft transit flight plan back to the Solar System. They did a standard cryosleep flight through the Sirius Power Cluster Farm, and got to the Solar System about a month or so objective time after departing Glister. They turned the captain and the data over to Chronologic Patrol Headquarters and went on to other duties. CP HQ kept the captain of the Herakles IX and the data recordings in time containment until the objective-time year, day, minute, and second of the ship’s uptime-end entrance into the Circum Central Wormhole.

  “At about the same time, my ship, the Upholder, zx-rived back at the Solar System, and the Stardrifter Gamma arrived at Thor’s Realm. For getting on eighty years, the only information on the Circum Central Incident had been the bare-bones account my ship had been allowed to send downtime—nothing more than a playback of what the Standfast had sent uptime. And that information, I can assure you, was kept very tightly under wraps. The only other information anyone had was that four out of five ships in that Glister convoy had vanished, along with the Upholder. By the time we returned to base, the story, and the mystery, had more or less died of old age—except on Glister, I suppose.

  “Then the Stardrifter Gamma, the Upholder, and the information from the Herakles IX all popped up into view, one after another. Rumors started to float around. Crew from the ships circulated and started to talk. The messages relayed from Thor’s Realm to the Solar System and back leaked here and there—and of course the data on the Intruders floored everyone. The whole tale came back to life. Everyone and everything sprang into action, trying to solve the mystery of the Intruders. Patrol Intelligence interrogated the captain of the Herakles IX for three days straight, just for starters, and went over every bit and byte of the Herakles data. Then the Patrol got their hands on the Stardrifter, and on the Upholder—and me.

  “The interrogations, the debriefings, the analyses went on forever. They studied everything, and then studied it again. They even examined the piece of shrapnel, assumed to be part of one Intruder that blew up, that sliced into my bridge and buried itself in my detection officer’s brain. But the sample was too contaminated by explosion and impact and all the ricochets it had taken bouncing around the bridge. It told them nothing. Nothing told them anything. The mystery came alive after eighty years of waiting, but it died again.

  “Except on Glister. Glister had been in bad shape when I killed the convoy ships. Eighty years on, it was teetering on the ragged edge of final collapse. And suddenly, with the more complete story of Circum Central coming out, they had someone to blame. All of their bad decisions and budget cuts and bad luck didn’t matter anymore. I did it. Because of me, four ships out of five in a convoy eighty years before never arrived. And because of that, because of all the magically potent and powerful cargo that was supposed to be on the other four ships, everything had gone wrong. I had killed their planet. Complete nonsense, of course. They were not utterly cut off. There were other routes—albeit more difficult and expensive routes—to and from Glister. Supplies and people could get through.”

  “But not easily,” said Norla.

  Koffield paused a moment. “No,” he said at last. “Not easily. Circum Central was in the optimal location for transport to Glister. With Circum Central operational, it was an eighty-year objective-time trip to Earth. Without it, the next shortest routing turned it into a hundred-and-forty-year trip. That nearly doubled the wear and tear on the ships, made cryosleep far more dangerous, and made it massively more difficult to transport the biological material that Glister needed. Fewer ships were willing to make the run to Glister, and there were more casualties among those that did. That, I’m sure, did make things far more difficult for Glister. For that, I suppose, I could be blamed.

  “But the ironic thing, from my point of view, is that the Intruders, whatever or whoever they were, or are, were never blamed. I did it. Not the ships that attacked me. To Glisterns, the Intruders were incidental to the whole story. Maybe I would have destroyed the wormhole even if they hadn’t existed, out of sheer spite. Maybe the Intruders didn’t exist. Maybe I had faked them, somehow, to provide an exculpatory motive for my crime against the good people of Glister.

  “Aside from the Glisterns, most people were at least somewhat more interested in the Intruders than in what I had done. The moment the Circum Central story came out, there were any number of false sightings of Intruders coming in and out of every wormhole in space, circling every planet that experienced bad luck. Anything from a patch of bad weather to a currency collapse could be blamed on the Intruders. There were endless guessing games as to what they were. Alien beings, the nonhuman intelligences we’ve never found. A covert operations team sent by the Chronologic Patrol, or by nearly any other organization you can think of, to perform some mysterious and complex mission. They were a bizarre natural phenomenon, and their seemingly intelligent behavior was all explained away by invoking some little-known—and nonexistent—physics and mathematics.

  “But there were no answers, and so, after a while, most of the questions and theories and sightings faded away, though there was still a sort of background-noise level of theory-spinning and lunatic-fringe research, the way there always is when something big and inexplicable happens.

  “But they still had me. I was someone—something— they could point their fingers at. I learned very quickly that there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do, that would make it go away. I gave up trying. Silence seemed to make more sense.”

  “But what about the Chronologic Patrol?” Norla asked. “You followed their orders, did what they asked. Didn’t they support you?”

  Koffield was silent for half a minute. “The Patrol,” he said at last. “They were part of my silence. They certai
nly sent plenty of signals to the effect that I should keep quiet. I’m sure they hoped that I would vanish altogether.”

  “But they promoted you. Decorated you. Told everyone you were a hero.”

  Koffield nodded. “There are times in any organization where the higher-ups will support a subordinate, back him to the hilt in public—but treat him very differently in private.”

  “They punished you?”

  “My superiors backed me up in private just as much as they had in public. And, frankly, so they should have. What I did at Glister was absolutely, one hundred percent, totally in line with Patrol policy. The whole purpose of the Patrol is to see to it that what could have happened at Circum Central, what nearly did happen, never does happen. What took place—what I did—was terrible. The alternative would have been infinitely worse—and my superiors knew it. The core reason for having a Patrol at all is so what I did could be done.”

  “I heard the arguments on both sides of that point after—after the incident,” said Norla. “Everyone did.” And which side of it did you come down on? she asked herself. She had never been sure of her own answer to that one.

  “Inside the Patrol, there was no argument, could be no argument,” Koffield said, his voice still quiet. “There was only Patrol doctrine—and I followed it, and the Patrol backed me up, in public and private.”

  Koffield went silent for a moment, and Norla knew that she would have to urge him on before he could say whatever it was that came next. “But?” she asked. “There’s a ‘but’ in there, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Koffield said. “They backed me up, in public and private. But.” He turned back toward the porthole, and once again looked out at the stars. “But. There is such a thing as realism. And there are such things as whispers, and pointed fingers, and stories that get more overblown with every telling. And for a senior officer there are such things as official receptions, visiting delegations, courtesy calls on other commands, public occasions of all sorts.