The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “So now they’ll freeze.”

  “They’ll be cold, that’s all,” Yuri said sharply. He frowned and shrugged. “I know how harsh it all sounds, but there’s only so much we can do, and we’re doing it. We’re shifting machines off other work .to make blankets and warm clothes and portable heaters and so on, but we don’t have the manufacturing capacity or raw materials to do it very quickly. If we shifted enough resources to give them everything they need as quickly as possible, it would wreck the station. Probably kill all of us. That’s the tightrope we’re walking, in a dozen ways at least. Vehicle command. Drive on.” The free-runner pulled itself back onto the paved path and drove on.

  The path ran roughly at right angles to the Long Boulevard, following the inner circumference of the station, driving along on the inside of the huge cylinder. Norla’s eyes insisted that they were constantly just about to start climbing a hill that grew steeper and steeper, while an equally steep hill was always just behind them.

  What they had seen at first arrival repeated itself over and over again as they drove; the same destruction, the same huddled groups of people, the same dust and smoke and gloom.

  At last the free-runner slowed down, and then turned onto a side path. There was what seemed to be another of the decorative ponds, a round dark hole in the lawn. But then Norla noticed one thing different about this pond— and then another, and another. The other ponds had all been artfully rounded abstract shapes. This one was perfectly and precisely circular. The others had no barriers between themselves and the surrounding lawns. This one had a quite substantial meter-high metal fence around it. And none of the other ponds had anyone watching over them. Norla counted six rifle-toting guards around the perimeter of this “pond.”

  And then came another of those pulses of light—flaring up out of the pond. It was increasingly clear that it was no pond at all—though what the devil it might be, Norla had no idea.

  “What is this place?” Norla asked as the free-runner came to a halt by a footpath that led toward the whatever-it-was.

  “DeSilvo Tower,” Yuri said. “Come along.” He stepped out of the free-runner and gestured for his two guests to do the same.

  Koffield’grabbed his secured container by the handle, lifted it, and carried it out of the vehicle. Norla got out after him. “Doesn’t look like much of a tower to me,” she muttered to Koffield.

  “It looked like more of one when we saw it from the other side,” Koffield replied with a chuckle.

  It took a moment for Norla to understand. “Oh!” she said. “Of course.” They weren’t looking at the top of this tower. She walked toward the base of the tower with a more eager tread. For the first time since setting foot off the Cruzeiro do Sul, she was curious and eager to see something.

  She followed Sparten up the path. He gestured to one of the guards, who nodded and signaled the others to let the party pass. Sparten stopped at the guardrail around the perimeter of what Norla had taken for a pond. Sparten smiled, and it was a faintly weary, tolerant expression: the local who had taken endless tourists to the same site, and knew exactly how the ritual went.

  He turned his back on the guardrail and leaned against it, facing out away from the abyss behind him. “Take a look,” he said. “It’s worth seeing, even in its present state.”

  Norla moved cautiously over to the guardrail and looked down into the “pond”—and at three towers reaching down toward infinity. Beyond a massive slab of nonre-flective and highly transparent glass, easily ten meters across, there was nothing but space itself. Space and—a structure. Three shafts of steel and glass, each hexagonal in cross section, stabbed up from beyond the edges of the huge observation port. They were equally spaced from each other, angling in to join far below, connecting with the base of a glittering steel-and-glass hexagonal something directly below. The sight was strange enough, bewildering enough, that it took her eyes a while to understand what she was seeing.

  “DeSilvo Tower is really three towers in one,” Sparten answered, before she could ask, in the faintly singsong cadences of someone who has said the same thing many times. “The three pylons form the three legs of a tripod. At their far end, as seen from the station, the three pylons attach to the base of the hexagonal structure you see.

  Officially, that six-sided structure held in place by the pylons is called the Grand Pavilion, but some people call it the Outrigger, or Outrigger Pavilion. I don’t quite understand that name, but I’m told an outrigger is a sort of auxiliary hull on some kinds of watercraft. Most people call it the Gondola, which makes a bit more sense to me.

  “You’re looking straight down at the base of the main structure. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either the highest point or the deepest point on the station. At any event, the station commander’s office is on the farthest-out deck of the Gondola, and is therefore the point on the station farthest from its center.

  “The three pylons you see rise up out of the station’s hull. They are ten stories high—or deep. You can’t tell from this angle, since we’re exactly face on to it, but the Pavilion is six stories tall.”

  “There must be a hell of a counterweight on the other side of the station,” Koffield said.

  “Well, obviously, we have to build all the extruded structures in tandem, or the spin would be thrown off completely,” Sparten said. “There were questions of moment-arm and so on, of course, but naturally, if we hang a megaton of steel out this side of the station, we need to hang another megaton a hundred eighty degrees away. In fact, DeSilvo Tower is the real counterweight. One reason it got built was to balance off the bulk-storage towers on the opposite side of the station.

  “You can see that the three pylons are not just support structures, but true buildings in and of themselves. Supposedly they resemble a certain style of antique steel-and-glass towers they used to build on Earth, though I don’t know much about that. We’re about to ride an elevator down one of those towers, down to the Pavilion, where your quarters are. Come this way.”

  Norla lingered as long as she could, fascinated by the incredible structure. It seemed a mad thing to build on a station that plainly had so many old, half-complete repairs on its outer hull, but that madness almost—almost—didn’t matter. Its own magnificence was nearly reason enough for building such a thing.

  As she watched, the heavens wheeled past the rotating station, and the surface of Solace hove into view beyond the fixed frame of DeSilvo Tower. The brightness of the planet flooded the huge viewplate with light, and seemed, from this vantage point, to light up the whole interior of Ring Park. At least that explained the light pulses.

  Norla wondered why the station managers didn’t opacify the viewplate in order to eliminate the pulses. Maybe there was such a mechanism, but it had been damaged. Maybe leaving the viewport transparent helped with the temperature management problem. Or maybe the station managers were hoping that a blast of light every few minutes would help drive the gluefeet away.

  Norla shaded her eyes until the light pulse was over and watched again through dazzled eyes as the stars swept past the triple towers. She could see people inside the pylon buildings, moving around behind glass walls. A bit of movement at the corner of her vision caught her eye. She looked down one of the three pylons and saw what was plainly an exterior glass elevator car climbing from the Pavilion toward the station. She could see the people in the car, their faces close to the glass, staring at the view.

  That was one elevator ride she just had to take. She looked up, intending to point out the car to Koffield, but he wasn’t there anymore. She looked around, and suddenly saw that he and Sparten were already heading toward a low building set into an artificial hillside. Judging from the angle she saw through the viewport, it was the access point for the aft pylon.

  She hurried to catch up.

  Yuri Sparten paused at the entrance to the elevator, letting his two visitors go in first and get closest to the glass outer wall of the elevator car.

&
nbsp; Koffield could not help but be amused at the way Norla eagerly moved forward toward the glass, even though they were still inside the station and there was nothing to see but the black wall of the elevator housing.

  Koffield had been doing his best to hang back and observe Sparten, along with everything else—but even the best human observer cannot watch in every direction. Sparten’s behavior had told him a lot already, and no doubt the view out the elevator would be worth seeing. He turned his attention to the view out the car’s glass wall just as the car started its descent toward the Outrigger, or Pavilion, or Gondola, whatever name they called it by. The car dropped out of the station’s hull, revealing the universe beyond, daz-zlingly brilliant objects—the planet, spacecraft on approach, the far-off stars—set against the jet-black skies of deep space.

  The view% from the elevator car was, of course, spectacular. Anton Koffield had expected nothing less. More than likely, the remarkable view had been one of the major reasons for building this whole absurd complex.

  The two other pylons were gleaming blue steel-and-glass towers set into the station hull forward of their own pylon. They framed the view of the fleet of ships, functional and derelict, that orbited forward of the station and in formation with it. The ships, the stars beyond, the planet below, wheeled slowly, majestically, across the sky.

  Koffield looked up toward the station itself as they fell slowly away from it. At first it was nothing but a huge and featureless plain of darkness, the blackness punctuated only by the massive viewport they had just looked through, a rounded pool of yellow-white light that seemed to drop away into the heavens as they descended from the station. But then the station’s orbit brought it out of the planet’s shadow, and into the sunlight. The huge mass of the station blossomed into brilliance, the complicated structures on its surface a sudden hard metallic forest of cranes and towers and piping.

  Koffield had flown in an airship once, a lighter-than-air vehicle that was little more than a gondola suspended from a massive, rigid lifting bag. Looking up at the great bulk of the station looming overhead, it was impossible to avoid comparing the two images. He was in a car sliding down a guide wire connecting the gasbag and the Gondola.

  He looked down and watched as the planet swept past and dropped behind, to be replaced by the wheeling stars of deep space. If he watched long enough, the disk of Solace would come into view again from the other side, but there was too much else to see now. The view was remarkable. Of course, one could get jaded about nearly anything. He glanced over at Sparten and saw that he was watching the elevator floor indicator, not admiring the view.

  Koffield looked down. The main structure of this mad engineering folly was getting closer, the hard edges of its cold blue glass and steel gleaming in the sunlight. In its center, directly underneath the giant viewport they had looked out of at the station, was an oversize hexagonal viewport set into the top deck of the Gondola. He could plainly see people at the hexagon viewport looking up at their elevator car, pointing to it, waving at them. Koffield resisted the urge to wave back, but allowed himself a small smile when he saw that Norla did wave.

  Their increase in weight was distinctly noticeable as they moved farther out from the central axis of the station. The increase in simulated gravity brought the matter of masses and stresses and loads to Koffield’s mind. What sort of bearing members and structural reinforcement had it taken to suspend the monstrous load of DeSilvo Tower from the hull of the station? Surely the hull had never been designed to take such stresses. How difficult and expensive had it been to strengthen it? Had they done the job properly?

  The sunlight struck the forward pylons, and then the forward end of the Gondola. Instantly, the cool blue of their exteriors shimmered into gleaming silver as the smart glass shifted from transparent to full-reflective mode.

  But even full-reflective mode couldn’t keep all the light out. Even if one percent of full-strength raw sunlight percolated through the glass hull of the pylons and the Gondola, that would represent a massive heat influx. Koffield couldn’t even begin to guess at the energy cost for the Gondola’s environmental control system.

  Even assuming all that glass was tempered and insulated, and blocked nearly all the unwanted raw sunlight, an air-filled glass box like that would absorb and retain a tremendous amount of heat. And of course they had to keep the interior at an even temperature when the tower went into shadow. Perhaps they actually had to create heat to keep an equilibrium. The cooling and heating problems had to be enormous.

  No wonder the station’s air and thermal regulation were out of whack. The basic station structure had a solid, totally opaque, heavily insulated hull, in a shape that was relatively easy to heat and cool efficiently. Its environmental systems didn’t have to be very large or powerful in relation to the station’s size, and they could take advantage of economies of scale. The exterior structures weren’t big in comparison to the entire station, but they had to be drawing on the environment systems out of all proportion to their size. The strain of keeping the Gondola and the other towers comfortable must have put a strain on resources long before the first refugees showed up.

  Madness, from start to finish, but not in the least bit surprising, given everything else he had seen and learned so far. Perhaps even predictable, as depressing as that notion was.

  The glittering six-sided jewel that was the Gondola loomed ever closer, until the car slipped down into the upper deck of the place. All of them blinked and widened their eyes, straining to make their eyes adjust to the sudden drop in illumination.

  They had arrived at the Gondola, at a place that had no business existing to begin with.

  Elber Malloon sat by his campfire, holding little Zari in his lap, and stared at the entrance to the Gondola elevator by the big viewport, the viewport they wouldn’t let him use anymore. He had watched them come, and then he had watched them go. And now he stared at their point of departure, as if memorizing the place where they had exited would help fix them in his mind.

  The young, hard-featured man in the Station Services uniform he had seen before. The young man had come and gone several times, ferrying these or those dignitaries or specialists through on the official tour of inspection, the scheduled viewing of the gluefeet. That one, he dismissed from his thoughts.

  But his passengers this time, the older man with the military bearing, and the young woman with him—they were different, very different from the officials who came and stared, as if gluefeet were merely some odd species of animal life kept penned up for study.

  Part of it was the shock on their faces. They were surprised. They had not seen this before, or heard about it, or had any expectations about it. Everyone else who came through on the free-runners was either a bored bureaucrat like the young hard-featured man, tired of seeing it all, struggling to turn a blind eye to what was right in front of him, or else they arrived on the scene with their minds made up. They were angry, or horrified, or dripping with sympathy, long before they got to Ring Park.

  Not these two. They were astonished by what they saw.

  But there was something more. It was not until his wife returned with their food rations, and he saw the look on her face, that it came to him. That look. No doubt he wore the same expression himself. That was the whole point. “It was the strangest thing,” Elber said to Jassa as she sat down next to him. “Two more uppers just went by on the tour.”

  “What’s so strange about that?” she asked, taking Zari from him. “They come and look at us all the time.”

  “Nothing,” said Elber. “But it was the looks on their faces. They were uppers, all right, posh, clean clothes. They’d been fed okay—maybe a little thin and pale, but not much. And the free-runner’s driver treating them right. Uppers, for sure. But—but the looks on their faces. They were like us. Like us.”

  Jassa looked at him and frowned. “What do you mean, ‘like us’?”

  “Those two. You could see it, in their faces, in their eyes
, even from far off. Shocked, and scared, surprised— and something more. It was there in their eyes to see. They’d lost everything, been lost to all, and got dropped into a new world they didn’t know.

  “Those two,” he said again. “They were as lost and far from home as we are. Maybe more.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Chamber of the Conjuror

  Sparten led them briskly through the glittering upper lobby and directly under the hexagonal overhead viewport. Norla had only the briefest of chances to look up at the massive bulk of SCO Station looming overheard. Even then, she had to break into a trot to catch up with the other two, nearly stumbling in the noticeably higher gravity. She had forgotten how much of a nuisance variable gravity was aboard a spinning station.

  Directly below the overhead viewport was a circular open space in the deck, or floor, whatever one might call it here, with a low railing around it. The opening took up about half the space under the overhead viewport and was centered exactly under it. Norla looked down and saw a vast atrium, a great open space, circular in cross section. It extended five levels down. On each level below her there were people leaning on the railings, looking up or down or across, pointing things out to each other.

  Norla looked straight down to the lowest level. She saw three wedge-shaped pools of still water, the barest of ripples ruffling their mirrored surfaces. She looked down into the pool directly beneath her, and spotted her own far-off reflection, framed by the view out the hexagonal overhead port above her. Down there in the still water, she could see the reflection of SCO Station looming up behind her. Between the water wedges were three walkways that met at a central circular dais, exactly in the center of the lowest level. Norla looked up, craning her neck to see SCOStation overhead and figuring the sight lines. If one stood at that central dais on the lowest level, one could look straight up at the viewport in Ring Park through which Norla had seen the station.