The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “And yet I was already of two minds. I think, even then, I was starting to see, in the back of my mind, that he had seen in me a tool that he could get cheap, and get good use from. I have made use of many people in my life, and there are certainly worse things to be than useful—but I had always tried to be honest with the people I used, made sure they understood the transaction, and understood what was being given and taken by both sides.”

  Norla had to smile at that. She certainly felt that Koffield was getting use out of her, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what the terms of the transaction were.

  Koffield went on. “But DeSilvo did none of that. He pretended I was his great friend, his treasure beyond price, his indispensable man. Puffery, and fraud, all of it—and pretty transparent, as well. It was oddly insulting that he didn’t even expect me to see through it.

  “I suppose the normal, sensible thing to do once I discovered the missing books would have been to turn to a librarian, or perhaps to one of DeSilvo’s archivists, or even to DeSilvo himself, and ask about them. But I realized that I could no longer believe that it would turn out to be some innocent mistake. It had gone past that point long before, about the time I noticed a pattern to what was missing.

  “Perhaps, after that, the next most normal thing would be to conduct a computer search myself. There is almost always a way to track something down in a computer system after it has been erased or moved. But I already knew that someone—and I had a pretty good idea who—was playing games with the Grand Library computer system. I knew how sophisticated and secure the GL system was. It would take someone with great skill and knowledge, and very powerful access, to manipulate that system.

  “Someone who could do that could also set up drop-traps and search monitors and other defense and detection systems in the computer system. I had to assume that, if I ran a search, DeSilvo would know about it almost at once. I didn’t want to tip my hand too early.

  “Besides, there was another thing I knew after my time in intelligence: A person who can manipulate a computer system that well tends to think in terms of computer systems and Artlnt operators. So much of what they know about the world comes to them through computer displays that they start to think that the world is what the computer and the Artlnt-ops tell them it is. If the computer records show that the book has been deleted, then it has been. That was something I could take advantage of—by doing a physical search. Not many people even realize that such things are still possible. They don’t think of knowledge as having a physical location or existence. They think it’s a cloud of invisible data that can be anywhere it is needed. But knowledge is still real, and still can be—must be—enshrined in physical objects, in books.

  “There’s an important rule of thumb it took the record-keepers of the near-ancient era a long time to learn. It is this: The more technically sophisticated a data-storage system is, the sooner it will become difficult or impossible to read and retrieve that data, once the technology becomes obsolete. We can still read the Rosetta stone, because it was carved on a rock. We can still read the nineteenth-century translations and commentaries on the stone, because they were printed on paper, and the facsimile versions of those books that we have today were printed on archival-quality flex-sheets that should last for thousands more years. But we can’t read much of what was written about the Rosetta stone after the late twentieth century. We no longer know how to decipher the data in that era’s storage systems, and their data storage has degraded over time.

  “The obvious solution to this problem is to store vitally important documents in a way that will stay as legible as long as the Rosetta stone has, in the form of scrolls or bound books, or in permanent self-decoding systems.

  “Knowing all this, I reasoned that if someone, at some time, had thought that Ulan Baskaw’s work was important enough, and would have long-term importance, then Baskaw’s work would have been put in the Grand Library’s Permanent Physical Collection.

  “I decided to try looking there, though just getting to < the PPC was something of a challenge. There are actually two PPCs, one intended as a duplicate of the other— though of course it’s impossible to keep the two collections perfectly synchronized with each other. The Main PPC is in an old deep-space orbital habitat, orbiting Neptune, though in a completely different orbit than the Grand Library habitat. The reserve PPC is buried somewhere on the Lunar Farside, I believe. They keep the exact location quiet. The idea is that no one catastrophe, short of the Sun somehow going supernova, could knock out the Grand Library and both permanent collections.

  “I knew that I wanted to move carefully, and that it was important that I avoid arousing DeSilvo’s suspicions. For that reason, I couldn’t simply announce I was looking for Baskaw’s suppressed works and hop a lift on a shuttlecraft over to the PPC habitat. I didn’t want to do anything that would so much as remind DeSilvo that the Permanent Physical Collection even existed. To do so might remind him that he had failed to destroy any copies of Baskaw’s work that survived there, and inspire him to beat me to the prize. I had to come up with a plausible cover story, an acceptable reason for me leaving the Grand Library habitat long enough to search the PPC.”

  Koffield paused again, and he grimaced unhappily before going on. “So I did something I’m not proud of. I told my superiors I needed to take medical-disability leave. I was entitled to it, after Circum Central, and the—difficulties—of our flight back from there. They had even urged me to take it. The doctors had gone on and on about mental and emotional exhaustion, the danger of a nervous collapse. But I had refused.

  “Now I went back to them and told them they were right, that I needed a rest, a chance to get away. And it might have been true. Maybe I was about to snap. Maybe all my suspicions about DeSilvo were total raving paranoia. There’s the old joke—just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. It turns out that I was right about DeSilvo. But the fact that I was right does not prove I was sane. Especially as what he did, what I suspected him of, was at the very least something close to insanity.

  “I got my leave, and told everyone that I was headed for a vacation in Nouveau Port-au-Prince, on the Old Haiti side of the island of Hispaniola, back on Earth. It was a plausible place for me to go. I’d always been interested in Caribbean history, the Haitian population crash way back when, and the ecorevival there. Some historians point at the rebuilding of Hispaniola as the real beginning of terraforming.” Koffield was silent for a moment. “You might say that Haiti was the success that encouraged us to plunge into a thousand failures,” he said.

  Norla frowned. “I don’t understand. What failures?”

  Koffield looked at her sadly. “The ones all around us,” he said gently. “The ones we’ve lived our whole lives in, without ever seeing.”

  It was not the clearest of explanations, but Norla let it go. “Maybe I’ll understand that later,” she said. “Go on.”

  “You will understand,” he said. “Very soon. In any event, once I was officially on leave, there was no requirement for me to report my whereabouts or file travel plans. The privacy laws were strong and rigidly enough enforced. But I decided not to trust the privacy laws too far. I booked flights and ground transport and a villa in Nouveau Port-au-Prince, never intending to use any of them. I wanted to leave a false trail, in case DeSilvo did try to track me. I paid for everything in advance. Many businesses will try to track down a man who makes reservations and does not pay for them. Very few will try and track down a man who pays for, but does not use, their service. If the hotel room is paid for, the hotel manager Artlnt will not waste too much effort wondering if it is actually occupied.

  “I used a lot of tricks I learned in my intelligence days, not only to create a complete false trail for DeSilvo to follow, but also to make it all but impossible for DeSilvo to track my real movements, if it entered his mind to try to do so. I still had no idea if he suspected me at all.

  “The long and the short
of it is that the ship back to Earth left without me, but any source DeSilvo would be able to check would show I was aboard. But I wasn’t. Instead, I caught a local shuttle out to the Permanent Physical Collection habitat.

  “I had never been to the PPC before, but I had done my homework well enough to be prepared. It’s a huge place, twenty kilometers long, with most of it in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, to keep old paper from oxidizing. The station environment is designed for the comfort of the books, not that of people. I was ready for the low gravity, and I had my breathing mask and cold-weather clothing and camping gear and so on.

  “I won’t trouble you with all the details of the trip, but even once I was in the PPC habitat, it took me two solid days of travel to reach the proper section of the library, camping in human-rated environmental study habitats, called reading rooms, each night.

  “It was not until the morning of the third day that I actually got down into the right section of shelved books, the stacks, as they are called. I walked for what seemed like hours along the endless shelves of books, with just a hand-lamp to light my way. They won’t power up the stack lights just for a single freelance researcher.

  “But then, at last, I was there, standing in front of the correct shelf, with the spines of three books by Ulan Baskaw right there at eye level. There was a certain strange pleasure in that moment. At some level, at least, I had proved myself right. I had more than half convinced myself, a couple of times, that what had set me off was nothing more than a clerical mistake, a typographical error citing misspelled titles. The books were missing, I told myself, because they had never existed.

  “But they did exist, and I could hold them in my hands. I took all three books, and made my way to the nearest reading room, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the shelves where I had found the books. I set up camp in the reading room, got the heat on, and powered up the air system. Then, at long last, I sat down and read what Ulan Baskaw had written, centuries before, trying to find whatever it was that had made DeSilvo want to make her books disappear.

  “As I sat down to read, I found myself wondering if I were chasing after nothing at all. I had no real evidence. Suppose I was just a paranoid fool? Suppose Baskaw’s books had been erased from the GL because they were boring, or useless, or inaccurate?

  “I read straight through the first book, and by the time I had finished it, it was a lot easier to believe I was just paranoid. It was called Statistical Analysis of Species Populations in Artificial Environments. It was Baskaw’s thesis, and, if I am any judge, an especially boring and pedantic example of a form of writing known for being boring and pedantic. The math in it was old-fashioned and convoluted, but still valid. The language was archaic, as was to be expected in a book that old. I needed a dictionary and a context interpreter to get through several passages. But there was nothing new in it. Maybe it was all groundbreaking stuff at the time. Maybe Baskaw was the now-forgotten founder of the whole field of population statistics. Or maybe she was just retreading ground that had already been walked over many times. I have no idea. But I could see nothing in that book that would be much of a skeleton in DeSilvo’s closet.

  “The second book, though—that one was pay dirt. A Proposed New Method of Terraforming was very plainly the basis for the whole Greenhouse-SunSpot system used at Solace. I was dumbfounded. Thanks to DeSilvo’s promoting the idea, the whole of Settled Space knows about Greenhouse and SunSpot. They even named the technique after him: DeSilvo terraforming. But it was not DeSilvo. It was Baskaw. Detail by detail, it was all there. Ulan Baskaw had set down on paper all the ideas DeSilvo claimed as his own. I had incontrovertible evidence that the entire process used to terraform the planet Solace was one huge act of plagiarism. DeSilvo had claimed for himself ideas he had stolen from a long-forgotten source.”

  “So what?” Norla asked. “What difference could it possibly make who gets credit for the idea? So DeSilvo covered his tracks and hid the source matter hundreds of years ago. I guess it’s the sort of thing that could cause a big ruckus in academia, but who else would care? It doesn’t change anything. If that’s what all this is about, it isn’t worth it!”

  Koffield looked at her with something close to annoyance in his expression. “Don’t be absurd,” he said sharply. “I would not have wasted my time or yours telling the story—or making the journey to Solace—if that were all there was to it.” His expression softened a bit as he went on. “I admit that right then and there, at the moment I discovered that second book, I wondered if that was all there was. It was an anticlimax. You’re quite right that it would not be enough to merit all my exertions. But, on the other hand, that second book would be more than motive enough for DeSilvo to suppress all mention of Baskaw in the library system.

  “But from my—our—point of view, if that had been all there was to it—well, what point in pursuing it? Perhaps I would have turned my notes over to the Chief Librarian, and let her deal with charges against DeSilvo. But, after that, I would have turned my back on it, and gone on with my life. Or at least with what passed for my life.”

  “Sir?”

  Koffield looked her straight in the eye, as if defying her to contradict him. “Would I have pursued any of it if life had left me anything else? I had no surviving family, no friends, no expectation of my career going anywhere but into dusty corners where no one could see me, places where my mere presence, my existence, wouldn’t be an affront, an insult, a dirty word shouted in the midst of polite society. I had nothing left.

  “But even in that state, I could only be drawn in so far by so little. Right from the start, I had gotten the sense that there was something seriously wrong, something more than DeSilvo merely covering his academic tracks.

  “What he had done, in erasing Baskaw from the main records of the Grand Library, was a far more serious crime than plagiarism—and one that carried a greater risk of detection, no matter how great his skill in manipulating computer memory systems. He was, indeed, detected as a result of hiding his plagiarism, not by the plagiarism itself.

  “It would have been far safer to conceal plagiarism by doing nothing. After all, the book that could betray him was one out of billions, and one that, more than likely, no one but himself had read in centuries. The odds against anyone reading it, and being able to connect it with his project, were remote indeed. No one else had made the connection—or at least reported making it—in all the decades since DeSilvo had started work at Solace. The erasure of Baskaw’s book from the digital records of theGrand Library, that was the clue that led to my discovering his plagiarism. If he had left the book alone, he would have been safe.”

  “So why did he do it?”

  “That was my question. Why take such risks? Men don’t overreact to risks and dangers they understand, and DeSilvo had been in academia all his life. He would have heard stories about plagiarists getting caught, and how it happened, and what the risks were—and he would likewise know how severe were the penalties for tampering with the Grand Library’s records. He would know the difficulties he would face in trying to do it undetected. The gains and risks didn’t balance out. Unless there was something else to it. Something more for him to hide.* And there was.

  “In the last chapter of A Proposed New Method of Terraforming, Baskaw discussed potential flaws in her idea—the idea that became Solace. She discussed weak points and unsettled issues that would have to be resolved before the ideas in one slim book could be turned into a way to remake worlds. And at the very end of that last chapter, she returned to the theme of her thesis, her first book: population statistics in artificial environments. It was just a few pages of material, a few relatively simple equations. But those equations had inspiration behind them. They were new to me. I’ve researched the literature, and they are new to everyone, down to our own time. They open new doors. More than that—they open doors that we did not even know were there.

  “Baskaw used them to highlight potential flaws in the process she was proposing, hav
ing to do with problems in keeping initial populations of multiple species in simultaneous balance, without one species overbreeding or dying out and distorting the food chain. The mathematics she used was brilliant, but she put it to use in dealing with far too limited a problem. It was as if she used a hypersonic semiballistic transport to go from city center to the suburbs. Baskaw used her new mathematics to deal with questions that were not merely trivial in comparison to the power of her equations, but questions that actually constrained the power of her equations.”But the questions she raised in those last pages were like a long-missing piece to a puzzle. Over the centuries since Baskaw wrote her books, and had her books ignored, and died as an unknown, we have assembled a great store of hard-edged, practical knowledge on the subject of terra-forming, and on the subject of multispecies population statistics. But the pieces we collected never made a coherent whole. The facts never assembled themselves into real wisdom, real knowledge. We have never had a systematic science of terraforming, only accumulations of empirical results and best guesses. But if you use Baskawian projection mathematics, apply her math to the huge, convoluted, confused mass of data and projections and results and failures in terraforming, suddenly things fall into place. I saw that at once. DeSilvo should have seen it as well.”

  Koffield rubbed his hands anxiously together. “And if he had seen it, as he should have, must have, if he read that book thoroughly, then his crimes are enormous beyond all calculation. The only possible way for him to have acted in innocence would be if he failed to read, study, and comprehend the entire text, the one slim book whose central ideas he stole, the book upon whose foundation he built his entire life’s work. Or else that he read those last few pages, and yet did not understand what should have leapt off the page at him. Otherwise, he is unquestionably guilty.” And Koffield fell once again into brooding silence, staring out the wardroom porthole at the blank walls of the docking bay beyond them.