The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Even the great Anton Koffield himself exhibited a bit of eagerness and impatience, and he even did something that was just microscopically irrational. While Norla was still completing her postflight checks, Koffield went into his cabin and brought out his precious secured container. He set it down by the side of the airlock. Norla watched him do it, and he caught her watching him. He smiled, and shrugged, and went back into his cabin without saying a word. It was quite absurd, really. How much time was he really going to save by having it that much nearer the airlock, once the lock opened? And for that matter, what point had there been in keeping the secured container in his cabin all this time? Had he expected her to try and steal it, or pilfer the contents?

  At least it was proof, or at least strong evidence, that Koffield was indeed human. And proof that he, as much as Norla, was ready, willing, and eager to get on with it.

  But SCO Station wasn’t ready for them. Station Medical saw to that. Station Med did not volunteer explanations and refused to give explanations when asked. Station Med simply made it clear that Koffield and Chandray would not be allowed to enter the station until they cleared a much more rigorous medical survey than usual. A service robot wheeled over to the Cruzeiro’s exterior airlock door and delivered two sampling kits.

  Once they retrieved the kits from the airlock, both of them had to go through the unpleasant, undignified process of providing the required samples of hair, nail clippings, saliva, stool, urine, ear wax, a balloonful of exhaled breath, and even scrapings off the inside of their mouths.

  Norla managed all of those on her own, but she knew not to try drawing her own blood if she didn’t have to. It would seem Koffield’s experiences had taught him the same lesson, and he was more than happy to trade help with the chore.

  There was a peculiar sort of intimacy to the moment, each of them rolling up a shirtsleeve and baring flesh for the other to stab, however carefully and gently, with a needle.

  Norla felt strange, and a trifle uncomfortable, to have Koffield’s hands on her arm, expertly massaging the flesh to bring out a vein. Neither of them had touched the other since the day he had revived her from cryosleep. There was something dangerous in the sensation of feeling his hands on her skin. The jab of the needle was merely cold, sharp, precise, rather than truly painful. The blood welling up in the sampling reservoir as he drew back the plunger looked redder than it should have.

  To Norla, it looked too perfect and archetypal to be real. It looked like pretend blood, ghoulish makeup, rather than the genuine article. But blood and steel did not worry her. It was, some deep part of her knew, Anton Koffield who was dangerous.

  Koffield cleaned and bandaged the needle mark on her arm, then undipped the sampling reservoir from the needle. The needle went down the trash chute, and the reservoir into its carefully labeled niche in the sampling kit, ready to be set in the airlock for the service robot to collect.

  “Now do me,” Koffield said, rolling up his own sleeve. In the most literal way possible, he was placing himself in her hands, opening himself up to her, and she wanted to show herself worthy of that trust. It was the work of but a minute to draw his blood and pack the sampling reservoir into his sample case. It took not much longer to seal up the two cases, confirm they were labeled properly, and set them in the airlock. Norla sealed the airlock hatch and pushed the buttons to start the lock cycle. “That should do it,” she said. “I wonder what they’re afraid of catching from us.”

  “Or what it is they’re afraid we’ll catch from them,” he said. “Disease vectors are two-way streets.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. “And I can’t blame them for being careful around people who could be carrying last century’s plague, and definitely aren’t carrying the antibodies to this century’s. But I don’t like being stuck here, waiting while they check.”Nor do I,” Koffield said. “All things considered, we’ve done all the waiting we should be expected to do, don’t you think?”

  Norla smiled at the small joke, then glanced down at the secured container that was still this side of the lock. The container Koffield had guarded so carefully still sat on the deck, ready to be moved out the airlock the moment they were allowed off the ship.

  “There’s some other waiting I’ve been doing,” she said. “I’ve been waiting to hear the end of your story. What’s in that Pandora’s box of yours? What’s it all about?”

  “I read that story about Pandora, read all the myths I could, back when I was a boy,” Koffield said. It was hard not to notice he wasn’t actually answering her question. “The way I remember the story, all the evils of the world flew out of the box the moment she opened it,” Koffield said. “Once the evils had escaped, she looked inside the box, and saw that the only thing still there was hope. That always bothered me. I couldn’t help but wonder—who’d put evil and hope in the same box, and why? And why did hope hide in the bottom of the box, afraid to come out, when the evils were brave enough to rush out the first moment they could?”

  “I assume you wouldn’t pack a case full of evil and bring it all this way,” Norla said. Or would you? she wondered. Anyone from Glister would believe you capable of doing just that. But she wanted answers to her questions, and she was damned well going to get them. “So if not evil, what is in your box? Is it hope?”

  Koffield frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. It was strange to see any such sign of uncertainty from the man. “Perhaps,” he said. “Hope, maybe, for some, anyway. Knowledge, certainly. And a warning, if anyone will listen.”

  “You said you’d tell me the rest of it,” Norla said, tven to herself, she sounded like a petulant child demanding another bedtime story. “You said you’d tell me everything before I needed to know it. Once they give us med clearance and we open that hatch again, things are going to start happening. I don’t think there will be time later on. I have to know before that hatch opens. Tell me.”

  Koffield looked down at his secured container, and then back at Norla. He nodded, in a way that seemed to signal, if not willing agreement, at least acceptance.

  But the last of the barriers was yet to come down. “It’s not the sort of thing I can tell in two minutes standing by an airlock,” he said. “They’ll need at least several hours before they clear us. Tonight. Tonight, over dinner, I’ll tell you the last of it.”

  Norla looked him in the eye and nodded back at him, she herself accepting, if not agreeing. She wanted to push harder, to make him get it all out in the open, once and for all—but she could sense that asking for more would likely bring her less. “All right,” she said. “Tonight.”

  Koffield smiled stiffly to her. “Until dinner then,” he said, turned, went back into his cabin, and closed the door.

  Norla stood there staring at the closed door. It seemed as good a symbol as any for time spent with Anton Koffield. “Until dinner,” she said to the door.

  It was not a meal she was expecting to enjoy all that much.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Domino Theory

  “This, sir, is what did it,” said Hues Renblant. He held up a standard-issue ten-centimeter archival program storage cube at shoulder height so Captain Marquez could see it. He held it the way a security officer might display his identity plaque, as a way of displaying his bona fides, his authority. “Or rather, the person who reprogrammed this cube did it.”

  Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez was sitting in the main command chair on the command level of the Dotn Pedro IV, but there was very little commanding he could do at the moment. Half the ship’s systems were down as the crew ran through exhaustive diagnostic tests on everything they could think of. It was no idle expression to say that they were working as if their lives depended on it.

  Marquez held out his hand for the cube, and First Officer Renblant gave it to him, though both men knew perfectly well a naked-eye examination of the cube couldn’t tell anyone anything. But Marquez wanted to touch the thing that had wrecked his ship, wanted to hold it in his hand and get a good,
long, close-up look at the device that had betrayed him.

  Not that it did him much good. It was a datacube just like any other. He set it down on the command console and looked at the two men, Hues Renblant and Dixon Phelby, who stood before him. “How?” he asked.

  “Superbly,” said Renblant.

  Marquez looked at Renblant sharply. Up until that moment, he would have said that the propulsion and guidance specialist had no detectable sense of humor—and he still wasn’t sure. The man might have made a joke, but it was more likely he was offering an honest opinion of the skills of whoever had sabotaged the cube. “Could you be a trifle more specific?” he asked.

  “Of course, sir,” Renblant said. “Timeshaft ships use the most archivally stable memory and data systems possible. They have to have working lives measured in the thousands, or tens of thousands, of years, and they are built with a great deal of internal redundancy and designed to make it easy to recover from an accidental erasure.”

  “What of it? Everything was erased in any event,” Marquez asked impatiently. After all, he knew the systems on his own ship.

  “Yes, sir. But not accidentally. We’ve established beyond any doubt that it was done deliberately.”

  “Then why does the ability to survive accidental erasure matter?”

  “Because our saboteur was unable to overcome those features completely. The cube there was the one that contained the entire program for retargeting the ship, and flying direct to Solace through normal space without benefit of a wormhole transit. But it had more than that on it. Once the ship had arrived, the cube activated a series of housekeeping commands—though housewrecking might be a better term.”

  “Then all the ship’s memories and logs were intact up until arrival?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see,” Marquez said, working hard to retain his composure in the face of such maddening news. For a hundred twenty-seven years the ship—his ship—had been methodically logging in a detailed and clear report of everything that happened to it, of what had happened, of what had gone wrong. And then, minutes, perhaps seconds, .before he was revived, it had all been wiped clean. To say it was adding insult to injury was to understate the case by orders of magnitude. It was a slap to the face of a mortally wounded man. “Please go on.”“The last four commands in the housekeeping sequence were to erase the event-logging system, and all backups for it, to erase the main retargeting program, to set up a timed command to zero out the clocks, and then to erase the housekeeping series itself. The important point is that the clock-zero command had to run after everything else had been blanked, or else there would be a datestamp left on the event log, telling the exact time the clock was zeroed. Since the clocks restarted from zero, having a datestamp would be as good as knowing the exact time. All you’d have to do is add the two numbers. So the clock-zero command had to run last, direct from the main system sequencer.”

  “And that’s where the housekeeping wasn’t as thorough as it might have been,” Phelby said cheerfully, speaking for the first time.

  Renblant looked at the cargo specialist with quite obvious irritation. The two men might have turned out to be a good work team, but it was in spite of, and not because of, their personal relationship. “Yes,” Renblant said. “Cargomaster Phelby located the one trace left by the sabotage.”

  “Well, Phelby?”

  “Yes, sir. The whole ship-control system is designed to make it easy to recover from errors. It was built to make it impossible for any command or sequence or program to erase itself, and also built with the capacity for cascade-recovery. Sort of like running a line of falling dominoes backwards. You put the last fallen domino back upright, and it pushes the one behind it upright. That pushes up the one before it, and so on. So I—we—knew that something— probably the zero-out-all-clocks command—still had to be in the system somewhere.” Phelby glanced at his companion. “Our saboteur hid his work pretty well, but we knew it had to be there. We were both looking, and either one of us could have found it,” he said. “It happened to be me. Once we found the clock-zero sequence, the rest was pretty straightforward.”

  “Very tedious,” Renblant agreed.

  “Boring as hell,” Phelby said, smiling back at his partner. “But we managed to flip a lot of the dominoes upright. Not all of them.”

  “Please go on,” said Marquez.

  “Yes, sir,” said Renblant. “We recovered a great deal of the sabotage program. Cascade-recovery has its limits, and some parts of it were irretrievably lost. But we did get enough of it to tell us a great deal. And the news is good.”

  “Good as it can be, under the circumstances,” said Phelby.

  “And that news would be?” Marquez asked.

  “We believe the ship is now clean. Once we had the sabotage program to examine, we were able to find several characteristic patterns to the way the programmer, the saboteur, did things. You could say we learned what his or her handwriting looked like. We’ve done a search for the same patterns in other elements of the ship’s systems, and they aren’t there. All the other systems give normal diagnostic results. There is no further sign of tampering.”

  “So there are no further booby traps waiting for us?”

  Renblant raised one eyebrow very slightly and shrugged. “A timeshaft ship is extremely complex. There will always be some way to conceal something on board, especially for something as microscopic and invisible as a bit of hidden computer code. But we have established there are no computer programs in the system that display any of the characteristics found in the sabotage program. Besides, the saboteur would have no reason to plant other traps.”

  “Why not?”

  “The first one worked,” Phelby said. “It did what the saboteur wanted it to do. Why plant a second one? I have no idea why the saboteur would want us delivered here a century and a quarter late, but that’s what the program was intended to accomplish, and that’s what the program did. It’s gone now. We can start reloading the nav and propulsion control systems from the nonvolatile backups whenever you like.”

  Marquez nodded. He could see that logic. But all the same, he was not going to gamble his ship on the strength of it. “Very well,” he said. “Good work, to both of you. But we’ll work on the assumption that something else

  might be waiting for us. We’ll continue with the full-ship diagnostic. Once it is complete, I still want full written reports from all sections—and a report from Koffield and Chandray about conditions in-system. Once I’ve had a chance to review all that material—we’ll start thinking about doing system reloads, and about what we do next. What you’ve told me is most reassuring—but I see no reason to take chances.”

  Renblant displayed no reaction, but Phelby cocked his head to one side arid shrugged. “We figured you’ve read it that way,” he said. “Can’t say as I’d disagree.” He grinned, but there was something sad, and lost, in his expression. “After all,” he said, “it’s not like we’re in a hurry anymore.”

  Norla should have been used to Koffield’s surprising her, considering all the times and all the ways he had done so. “Expect the unexpected” was a clever-sounding slogan, but Norla had never seen any way to actually do it.

  She could have spent the whole afternoon and evening expecting the unexpected and still been astonished by the meal put together by Admiral Anton Koffield of the Chronologic Patrol. She had known he was capable of commanding troops in battle, but she had not expected him to be able to cook. He certainly had offered no evidence of such a talent during their journey.

  The Cruzeiro do Swfs fold-away galley wasn’t much, and it had not been stocked with any great imagination, but even so, the meal he set before her smelled wonderful, even if she had not the faintest idea what it was. But even as she was seduced by the delightful smell, part of her was wondering why Koffield was doing it. Was it an attempt to distract her away from her questions? But Norla couldn’t believe that a strategist as intelligent as Anton Koffield would t
hink for half a minute that such a gambit would work. He dressed for dinner in a formal tunic and kilt. Perhaps it was merely a sense of occasion that inspired him. Tomorrow they would meet with the Solacians, and who could know what their intentions would be? Perhaps it was merely a case of the condemned man eating a hearty meal.

  Or perhaps—perhaps it was that Koffield felt that the end of a story, or at any rate the end of this story, deserved some sense of occasion.

  They spoke of inconsequential things over dinner itself— technical aspects of the approach and docking, the two of them using the same hand gestures that pilots had used for millennia to describe planes and ships moving toward each other. They discussed SCO Station’s physical appearance, the new and the old jumbled together like pieces of a life raft cobbled together out of whatever came to hand.

  The main course was done. Koffield served a sweet cake drawn from ship’s stores that tasted precisely as if it had been in cryostorage for a hundred years. At last the small talk petered out to nothing, and an expectant silence hung over the table.

  “Very well,” Koffield said, as if, instead of silence, the room had been filled with Norla’s badgering demands that he get on with it. “I suppose I’d better tell you the rest of what I know. On this subject, anyway. As you’ll recall, we left it with my discovery that someone had tampered with the Grand Library. That discovery hit me pretty hard, I can tell you. Even after everything I had seen, I still believed in DeSilvo.”

  Koffield thought for a moment and shook his head. “No. I have to go further than that. After—after Circum Central and Glister, I was still very close to low ebb. DeSilvo had been the one person willing to get near me, to have any faith in me, after that. It was desperately hard for me to stop believing in the one man who had at least seemed to believe in me.