The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Except what had happened to them. This crisis was not for the machines to deal with. This was hers. She was going to fly this sequence, and do it right, and enjoy it.

  Because she might not get another chance. That joke about their licenses being expired was no joke at all. Everything she knew was a century-plus out-of-date. Would she even be able to recognize a modern pilot’s station? Maybe ships these days didn’t even have pilot’s stations. She’d be lucky if they allowed her aboard a modern spacecraft, and never mind flying one. And if she could not serve on a space crew, what would she be good for? What work would she be qualified for here and now?

  Besides, it wasn’t as if flying the approach on manual was going to be all that manual. The way she was getting worked up about it, an outsider might think she was going to have to get out and push. When you came right down to it, all manual operation really meant was that she programmed the computers, rather than letting the station do it for her by remote.

  Unless—unless she elected to do it by true manual. Cut out all the automatics and fly the flight plan herself, right off the controls. She felt a sudden thrill of excitement. Well, why the hell not? She had been instructed to fly on “manual,” and she was certainly capable of doing the job.

  She felt a strange thrill of rebellion, a pleasurable sense of thumbing her nose at the authorities, the rules, as she cut every level of automatics and took hold of the manual controls for herself. She glanced at Koffield, expecting either a sharp protest, or no reaction at all. As usual, she got something completely different from what she had anticipated.

  The man was smiling, almost laughing, the humor in those warm, kindly eyes plainly visible for the first time in many days. He’s a pilot too, she reminded herself. He probably hates all the automatics at least as much as I do.

  Sparing no more thought for what anyone else might think of her, Norla ran through the premaneuver checklist, set up her attitude and her thruster levels, and settled back to wait out the countdown.

  Considered as a piece of interorbit transfer flying, it was nothing special. The engines fired briefly. Then they waited two hours, fifteen minutes, and nine seconds, until the ship was in position for the second burn. Another brief shot from the main engines, and the job was done.

  The second burn put them in an almost perfectly matched orbit, five kilometers astern of Solace Central Orbital. They were in a very slightly lower, faster orbit, closing very slowly on their target. If Norla performed no further maneuvers, the Cruzeiro do Sul would make a closest approach of exactly one kilometer to the station and then pass it by.

  Or at least that was what her instruments told her. But Norla wanted to see for herself—not just to confirm the instrument settings, but because she wanted to take a look.

  “All right,” she announced, as much to herself as to Koffield. “I’m extending the pilot’s cabin now. Initiating autoextension procedure.”

  “Very well,” Koffield said.

  “Initiating,” she announced. Norla confirmed that the station’s inner pressure doors were sealed, then flipped up the safety cover and jabbed her finger down on the autoextend button, a bit harder than strictly necessary. The pilot station’s outer pressure door slid shut, the movement of the transparent door panels barely visible. There was a low-pitched hum as the air pumps cleared the small amount of air between the inner and outer hull of the pilot’s station. Then a moment’s silence, then a deep and resonant clunk from overhead.

  Norla looked up to watch the two halves of the upper hull hatch split apart, revealing the dazzle-bright sunlit face of Solace, seeming so close and sharp she could have reached out and touched it. The upper hull hatch opened fully, and, with a low hum and a clatter and creak or two, the pilot’s station began to raise itself out of the hull.

  Like some long-forgotten god or devil moving out of the underworld and ascending to heaven, the pilot’s station rose up out of the darkness and into the light, out of the belly of the ship and into the sky.

  Norla squinted and blinked in the sudden brightness. “Bright-tracking glasses,” she said. She pulled open a small compartment on the control panel and took out two pairs of what appeared to be plain-glass spectacles of a sort that no one had worn for at least a millennium or two. She handed one pair to Koffield, and they both put them on.

  The glasses sent a signal to the pilot station’s hull photonics control system, indicating exactly what direction the wearer was looking in. The photonics system could then selectively and instantly darken the variglass of the station’s hull if a blinding-bright object appeared in that part of the sky. The system made sure nothing was too bright to look at.

  Solace bulged huge and bright, directly overhead, and she took a moment to admire the view. The sunlit side of the planet dimmed to a comfortable level the moment she had the glasses on. The planet’s terminator was almost precisely over their heads, slicing the planet into dark and light.

  Solace was big, bold, bright, a spectacular sight. But even from high up in space, it was plain to see there was something wrong with this world. A living world was a place of cool colors, blue and green and white, of vistas softened by clouds and moisture. Solace was hard, and bright, the land painted more in reds and browns and greys than green. Even the blue of the oceans was not quite right. It was too dark, too murky, the color of water that was full of dead things.

  Easy now. She was reading too much into it all. They needed knowledge, not poetry; facts, not fantasy. She was painting the whole planet with Koffield’s pessimism. Maybe things were nowhere near that bad. Maybe the light from the local star was just a shade she wasn’t used to seeing. Best she should admire the incredible view, and leave interpreting it to others. Any planet viewed from low orbit was a fantastic sight.

  But there would be plenty of time to look on Solace later. Right now she had other work to do. Norla adjusted the attitude of her chair so that she was lying flat on her back. She threw the switch on the heads-up display, and the upper face of the transparent cube that was the pilot’s station hull lit up with a half dozen information displays.She cut out everything but the data on rendezvous with Solace Central Orbital. Most of the blizzard of numbers faded away from the transparent hull, leaving just the range and rate, orbital velocity, and approach vectors.

  A white targeting circle lit up around a piece of sky over the nightside of Solace, pinpointing Solace Central Orbital’s position. But even at this range, Norla didn’t need the help. SCO was plenty big enough to see with the naked eye, a white cylinder off in the middle distance, slowly spinning in the sky. A station had to be plenty big for it to be easier and cheaper to spin it for gravity, rather than operate the sort of gravity generators used aboard ship. But SCO Station was that big, and then some.

  SCO was made up of a series of flat disks, stacked one on top of the other, each disk with a hole in its center. For reasons lost to the depths of antiquity, the basic design concept was called a lifesaver stack. The stacked-disk design made it fairly straightforward to expand the station, simply by putting additional disks on either end of the stack. The hole through the center of the stack greatly simplified the movement of spacecraft in and out of the station. Ships simply matched spin with the station and went in one end and out the other, rather than having to go through all the complex and tricky maneuvers needed to match up with an off-axis external port on a spinning station.

  The design had its drawbacks in other respects, but from a pilot’s standpoint, a lifesaver-stack station was close to the ideal. Nice, direct, on-axis approaches, with none of the madly complicated corkscrew maneuvers required by stations designed by spatial architects who worried about being advanced, or sophisticated, instead of efficient.

  Norla realized something was missing. Something wasn’t there that should have been. And then she realized what it was. Traffic. Her displays showed no other ships on approach to the station, no craft departing. Maybe trade was slow, but more likely, SCO Traffic Control had simply warn
ed everyone else off while the strange spaceship from the past made its slow, careful, manual approach.

  SCO Station swelled up in the sky, growing from a toy, a long thin top spinning slowly on its axis, into a massive world in the sky, a tower of gleaming metal and plastic and glass whirling silently through the darkness.

  Now it was plain to see that SCO Station was not a simple cylinder, but a cylinder with all sorts of structures sticking up, out of its outer hull. She switched on the long-range cameras to get a better look. Dozens of gleaming spires and complicated latticework structures thrust up from the circumference of the central disks. Dark turretlike buildings—if you could call them buildings—sprouted up from the hulls of the outer disks, alongside things that looked like the skeletons of parabolic antennae. Several of them looked broken, and a closer look at the turrets revealed several had portions of their outer skins stripped off. She realized that a good number of the extruded structures were showing signs of long use. The more she looked, the more she saw wear and tear. Missing parts, lost insulation, repair patches that did not quite match the original. Something like one in ten, or maybe even one in five, of the exterior structures had some sort of defect plainly visible even from long range.

  According to the information in the DP-IV’s library, SCO Station was a four-disk stack, with some discussion of expansion to six sometime in the future. None of the images she had seen of the place had shown anything built up out of the hull.

  But the station she was looking at was very plainly an eight-disk stack, and the four disks in the center of the stack looked distinctly older than the outer ones, their insulation sun-darkened and worn. If nothing else had convinced her that time had passed, those extra disks, and the towers, both shabby and gleaming, would have done so.

  She did not have long to spend on counting disks. They were getting closer and closer to the station, their view of it growing more and more foreshortened as they drew nearer and their orbital paths aligned. At last all they could see of the huge cylinder was the aft end of it, a wide flat disk hanging in the sky, straight ahead of them and slightly higher than they were.

  Norla looked down at the planet below. What was it like down there? What were the people doing?

  The Cruzeiro do Sul moved in slowly, until she was only a kilometer astern of the station. She checked her displays. One minute away from the final matching burn that would raise the Cruzeiro’s orbit just a hair, slowing it to match the station’s orbit precisely. The disk of SCO’s aft end was growing larger and larger, swallowing more and more of the sky as they grew closer. Now the hollow at the center of the disk-stack was plainly visible, a gaping mouth that seemed about to swallow them—as indeed it was.

  Norla brought the ship around to the proper attitude for the final burn, swinging the ship about to face away from the station. She checked her boards and repeaters one last time and watched the countdown clock. She blipped the auxiliary engines at three percent for two seconds, and they were perfectly matched with the station. Norla worked the attitude controls again and spun the Cruzeiro do Sul about to face forward, into the direction of flight. The ship came about smartly, and stopped her rotation with her nose pointed straight at SCO Station.

  And then they were there. A bare hundred meters from the aft end of the station, perfectly aligned with the center point of the station, hanging right over the central access tunnel, looking right down it, right through it, the stars in the sky beyond it plainly visible. Perfect.

  The next step was to match spin with the station. She switched the thrusters from attitude mode to spin mode and gave the clockwise thrusters the gentlest of taps, keeping her eyes glued to the aft end of SCO Station. She gave the thrusters another tap, and then another. As the Cruzeiro’do Sul came closer and closer to matched spin, from where Norla was sitting, it looked instead as if the station were spinning more and more slowly.

  Only the stars and planets, wheeling unimportantly in the background, in the periphery of her vision, betrayed the illusion. Another love tap on the spin-mode thrusters, and another. And they were locked, aligned, spin-matched, and at stationkeeping. She could see straight down the kilometer-long interior of the central access tunnel, watch the stars spinning in the piece of sky behind the station.

  She felt a sudden sense of disorientation, and knew what it was, even as it scared her silly. Her subconscious mind could not make up its mind on the very important question of which way she was looking. One moment her hindbrain had her flat on her back, staring up at the massive tunnel shaft directly overhead and about to fall in on her. Then, in the blink of an eye, she was hanging off the ceiling of some vast imaginary room, looking down into the bottomless depths of that tunnel, so deep it had stars at its bottom, and she was the one who was about to start falling. Then, somehow, it all went horizontal, and she was sitting upright in a perfectly normal chair, looking straight through a perfectly flat tunnel ahead of her, and no one was going to fall into anything.

  She resisted the temptation to cling to that last idea. Hang on to the comforting illusion, and things will only be worse when something shatters it. Better, far better, to grasp on firmly to the reality of a spinning city in space. Seize on to the strangeness, accept the strangeness, and it cannot hide behind the comforting fictions, or leap out at you when least expected. She took a good hard look at the central access tunnel of Solace Central Orbital Station.

  The tunnel itself was 150 meters in diameter, and ran the kilometer length of the station. Its surface was a perfect forest of complicated shapes wrapped around the inside of the tunnel. The station’s spin, naturally enough, produced simulated gravity, courtesy of the centripetal effect. Down was out, toward the exterior of the station, and up was in, straight toward the centerline of the cylinder. The horizon was, in effect, wrapped around itself. In the outer decks of the station, out toward the outer rim of the cylinder, the simulated gravity would be pretty substantial, but the gee forces on the cylinder’s inner surface weren’t anything much. But they were enough to hold things—all sorts of things—to the curving wall of the tunnel.

  Part of the world was right-side up, part was upside down, and the rest was on its side: landed ships, stored cargo, work lights, spidery manipulator arms, free-flying utility robots, and tiny space-suited figures kneeling here and standing there, doing whatever jobs could not be done except by human hands and human eyes,, right there on the spot.

  She could easily see the joins between the eight disks that made up the cylinder. It didn’t take a very sharp eye to see that the inner disks were the oldest ones, or that a lot of ships had paid a lot of calls here. The inner disks were darker with age, with more cuts and gouges and dings knocked into their armored hulls. Here and there were scorch marks left behind by thrusters fired a bit too hard a bit too close to the deck.

  But what about the station’s docking system? Norla thought back to her briefing books. Primary Transporters, they called them, robotic arms mounted to carrier cars. The cars moved on monorails that ran the length of the station. Her briefing books said there were two monorails, 180 degrees apart from each other, but Norla saw four, oversize I-beam girders running the length of the station, equally spaced around the interior of the tunnel, each painted bright red to make it as visible and noticeable as possible. It was, once again, easy to tell the old pair, dinged-up and worn-looking, from the new pair. The Primary Transporter Arms’ carrier cars rode on over-and-under wheels that held them firmly to the monorails as they rolled up and down the length of the station.

  It was hard to see at this distance, but it looked as if two of the arms were at present stowed away and powered down at the far end of the station. The third was doing some sort of lifting job about halfway down.

  And, she suddenly realized, the fourth was coming straight at her, riding its carrier car down the monorail, unfolding itself out as it came, like the leg of some absurdly overgrown monster spider. The carrier came to a smooth stop at the end of its rail, and the ar
m slowly extended itself beyond the station, lazily reaching for the Cruzeiro do Sul.

  Norla had to resist the temptation to grab for the controls and back the ship away, fast and hard, from the big, cruel-looking arm. This was what was supposed to be happening. The docking probe was on the end of the arm, its six capture petals opened up like a big hungry mouth, the two remote cameras on either side of the probe looking for all the world like the eyes of an insect monster that was closing in to devour them.

  Norla forced herself to settle down. Five minutes ago she had been patting herself on the back for chasing away her imaginary fears. It wouldn’t do her self-respect any good at all for the illusions to have the upper hand again so soon.

  The arm stopped its motion with the docking probe fifty meters short of the Cruzeiro do Sul. Norla let out a sigh of relief in spite of herself.

  “Looking good,” she announced to Koffield, more for the sake of having something to say than out of any need or desire to communicate. She looked over at him again. He was staring intently at SCO Station, not paying the least attention to her. The bright-tracking glasses only made his expression that much harder to read. Damn it, didn’t the man ever feel the need to speak? “We’re ready to dock,” she said, hoping to get his attention.

  “Yes, we are,” Koffield said, quite calmly.

  “How does it look to you?” she asked, struggling to get some reaction from him. It was an important moment. It wasn’t asking too much for the man to have at least some sort of reaction.