The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Koffield glanced down at the atrium, but did not break stride. He kept right on, still with his secured container, and Sparten kept pace with him. Norla lingered at the railing for a moment longer, then hurried to catch up. She found them waiting for her in yet another elevator car.

  This one was a more conventional sort of windowless box. She stepped inside, the door shut, and they proceeded down. No one spoke. As they moved still farther away from the axis of rotation, Norla’s apparent weight increased still further, up to about three-quarters of Earth gravity. The sensation of getting heavier made it seem as if she were riding an elevator moving up, not down, leaving her more confused than ever by this inside-out, upside-down building. She watched the numbers on the display count down from Upper Level, to 5, to 4, 3, 2, and then Main Level, where the base of the atrium was. She expected the car to stop and the doors to open there, but instead it kept going. The display blanked out, as if the level they were going to had no name, no number.

  The elevator came to a halt, and the door slid open. They stepped out, Norla going first.

  She had only time to see they were in an office, with a man at a desk ahead and off to the left, before the fumes hit her. The pungent odor of burning leaves assaulted Norla’s nose, and she blinked back sudden tears as a haze of smoke clawed at her eyes and throat. She sneezed twice, hard, then coughed violently.

  All she could think of was that, somehow, the bad air caused by the refugee crisis had all somehow pooled down here, at the very base of the Gondola. Half-blinded by her tears, she turned back toward the elevator car. They had to get out of here, head back up, alert the life-support people—

  “Sorry about that,” a flat, laconic voice said. “I forget sometimes it hits some people pretty hard. Wait a sec while I jack up the air blowers and the scrubbers.”

  A low rush of cool, clean air enveloped Norla. She coughed once or twice more, then breathed easier.

  She rubbed her eyes and blinked to clear them. The world blurred and shimmered before it settled down to reveal that the man behind the desk had stood up to face them. He glanced down at his desk and closed some sort of control panel, then looked back toward his visitors.

  He was a round-faced, tough-looking, angry-looking man. Short, heavyset, almost squat. He was very dark-skinned and his scalp was utterly hairless. His eyes were brown, deep-set, and penetrating, the whites of his eyes oddly yellowed. He was scowling as he looked at them, but somehow Norla got the impression that it had nothing to do with them. A scowl was the expression that his face fell into naturally.

  “Come on in,” he said, and picked something up from a shallow container on his desk and stuck one end of it in the corner of his mouth. It was a brown cylinder about fifteen centimeters long and about a centimeter and a half wide. His face twitched, and the end of the cylinder glowed orange for a second. He took the thing out of his mouth, blew a stream of smoke out into the air, and put the thing back in his mouth.

  Norla stared in fascination. She had heard of such things, but she had never actually seen anyone smoking a cigar before.

  “I’m Commander Karlin Raenau,” the man said. “They got me running this shop these days. Come on in and have a seat.” Raenau glanced over at Sparten. “No need for you to hang around,” he said. “You go get some real work done.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sparten said, then saluted and withdrew. Norla watched as he stepped back into the elevator and the doors shut—and was startled to realize that the elevator shaft did not extend this far down. When the car rose into the ceiling, it left nothing behind but a blank spot in the floor in the center of the vast circular office. A ceiling hatch irised shut after the car was gone.

  “He’s a good boy, but he gets me nervous,” Raenau said to no one in particular. Raenau sat back down behind his desk and gestured for Norla and Koffield to sit on the visitors’ chairs facing him. Raenau regarded his guests thoughtfully and did not speak at first.

  Norla took advantage of the moment to glance around the office. She began to realize that the vanishing elevator was far from the only strange feature of the place. The room was circular in its floor plan, half again as wide around as the main deck of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The ceiling was gunmetal grey, but the floor and walls were done in a single shade of flat matte silver. It was not until she noticed the faint image of a ship wheeling past under the floor and up one side of the wall that she realized the entire room, except for the ceiling, was made of adjustable-reflectance glass, smart glass, all of it cranked up to maximum opacity.

  There was a woven decorative hanging, with an abstract pattern, suspended from a freestanding frame that stood behind her chair, where it was directly in Raenau’s line of sight as he sat at the desk. What looked like a big decorative folding screen, with a fanciful pattern of swimming fish on it, stood to the side of the desk, opposite where the elevator car had been. It was too big an object, and too carefully positioned, in a spot too inconveniently close to the desk, for something just intended to be pretty. Norla guessed it was some sort of data display.

  There was a thick, lush, intricately decorated carpet under Raenau’s desk and the area in front of it, where she and Koffield sat. There were three or four groupings of furniture scattered about the open floor, each likewise with a decorative carpet beneath it, and with hangings or folding screens nearby. There was nothing actually hung from, or suspended from, the walls themselves.

  The room seemed to take up the entire level of the building. There were no doors in any of the walls, and plainly there was nothing but stars and space beyond the opacified wall. Norla looked up into the ceiling and noted several other irised-shut hatches of various sizes. Some of the hatches were large enough to drop a compact kitchen or washroom into the room. Clearly the room was designed to be configured in a half dozen ways.

  Big as the room was, it was nowhere as large across as what she had seen of the upper levels of the Gondola. She realized that this one office was hanging off the underside of the rest of the structure all by itself, a blister set into the base of the deepest tower, with no way in or out but through the ceiling.

  “Lots of toys in here,” Raenau said, and Norla realized that he had been watching her as she looked around them. “I don’t ever use them much. I needed a place to work, and they gave me a button-pusher’s playground.”

  “That’s all adjustable-reflectance glass, isn’t it?” Norla asked, gesturing at the floor and walls.

  “Multiglass, that’s right. Hardly ever use that at all. Wanna see?”

  Before either of them could answer, Raenau stabbed his finger down on a button and twisted a knob.

  The lights died, dropping the chamber into utter blackness. Then the floors and walls faded away into nothing at all. Norla cried out in surprise and alarm. Even the unflappable Anton Koffield let out a faint gasp of surprise. Norla closed her eyes tight, held the arms of her chair in a death grip, and forced herself to calm down. She let go the arm of her chair and slowly opened her eyes, looking straight ahead at Raenau.

  Or at least where Raenau should have been. There was nothing there but a small, faint dot of orange that flared and faded, flared and faded. Then she realized it was the end of his cigar, the ember glowing as he puffed on it.

  She looked down, at the black outline of the carpet, and the planet swooping past it down below. The stars wheeled past, and a small orbital tug came into view. Norla stood up, swallowed hard, and walked toward the edge of the carpet, hesitated a moment, then stepped out onto the absolute nothingness beyond. She heard the click of her heels on the deck, and could feel the solidity of the deck under her. But for all of that, when she looked down she saw nothing there beneath her. She looked down between her feet and watched the universe, the stars, the planet, the darkness of the void wheeling past in stately procession.

  She realized her hands were clenched into fists and forced them to relax. She looked behind herself, at the decorative fabric on the frame, right where Raenau could see it fr
om his desk. Now she understood the carpets and the carefully positioned hangings all around the room. Even when the glass was set at maximum opacity, there was a certain amount of see-through. No one wanted to see the ghost of the planet swooping past out of the corner of his eyes every couple of minutes. She noted there was no such hanging behind Raenau’s desk. Either the man hadn’t thought of it, or else he felt it would be to his advantage to have his visitors distracted.

  Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. She looked around the room and saw the clusters of furniture on their carpets, seemingly hanging in midair. She looked down again, and watched as the orbital tug rolled back into view. She got her bearings, then looked out through the forward wall, at.the fleet of ships, operational and derelict, that accompanied the station in its orbit. The room bloomed with light as the daylit planet swung past again.

  Then the room lights came slowly up, though the walls and floor remained transparent. The people and objects in the room, which had been merely outlines and shadows, regained their solid forms. It was somehow stranger still to see brightly lit, real-looking objects seemingly suspended, motionless, in space.

  Raenau stepped out from behind his desk and off the carpet onto the utterly transparent glass floor. He moved with a nonchalance that was a trifle overstudied, a sense of trying too hard to be casual about it.

  He looked down at the stars beneath his feet and puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “Here I am,” he said, “master of all I don’t survey.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Koffield asked. He still sat, composedly, in his chair, well over any momentary surprise or shock he might have felt when the floor vanished. An interesting note, that. Both Raenau and Norla had felt the need to prove themselves, demonstrate their courage, by stepping out into nothingness. Koffield had stayed put.

  “Master of all I don’t survey!’ Raenau repeated, and gestured downward with both hands. “I can quite literally see the whole universe from here, as the station rotates on its axis and orbits the planet. Sooner or later, every direction comes into view. The one thing I can’t see, the one direction I can’t look in, is toward the station I’m supposed to be running. That’s always invisible. They built this office—the whole damn Gondola—mostly as a way of impressing people, for the psychological effect. Make it all look big and grand. Makes the symbolism of not being able to see it from here even stranger, don’t you think?”

  “To be frank,” said Koffield, “I’ve been thinking on that and many similar points since the moment we came aboard. The Gondola is a shrine to the spirit of narcissism. It seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of being looked at from different angles, built merely for the sake of being constantly admired.”

  Raenau nodded. “I don’t know that the architect would admit any such thing, but it’s probably true all the same.”

  “Who was the architect? I mean no offense, but it seems to me that the person who built the Gondola must have been extremely self-absorbed, and yet extremely self-unaware.”

  Raenau laughed out loud, took the cigar from his mouth, and held a most theatrical finger to his lips, signaling for silence. “Careful who hears you say that,” he said in a loud stage whisper. “The Gondola and DeSilvo Tower are based on sketches left behind by the great Dr. Oskar DeSilvo himself.”

  “That,” said Koffield, “does not surprise me in the least.”

  Raenau chuckled to himself once again and walked back to his desk. He sat down and twisted a knob on the recessed control panel. The nothingness, the stars and the sky under Norla’s feet, faded away into the dull silver of the solid floor. If she looked very carefully, and very closely, she could still catch a glimpse of the brightest objects as they rolled past, but it wasn’t easy.

  Quite suddenly, she realized how foolish she must have looked, standing there peering down at the floor between her feet. Blushing with absolutely pointless embarrassment, she returned to her own chair and sat down.

  “Damned translucent walls,” Raenau growled. “They drive me nuts. It’s the same everywhere, in- all the private areas on the Gondola. Everyone moves in, twittering about the view, the view, the view—and then they realize they can’t stand having the universe wheeling past every minute of the day. The place is built for the sake of the views—and we’ve all put up shutters and screens and hangings to block it out.”

  Raenau stubbed out his cigar in the dish-shaped receptacle—an ashtray, that’s what it was called—and pulled a box out of a drawer on his desk. He opened it and took another cigar from it. He was on the verge of putting the box back when he hesitated for a moment. Norla hoped that the man had realized how rude it would be to light another of the damned noxious things in front of guests, and would therefore put them away.

  But Raenau’s hesitation had another motive, albeit one still couched in manners. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have offered these”—he held the box up—”to you people. I don’t suppose either of you would care for a cigar?”

  “No, thank you,” Norla replied, hoping her tone wasn’t too vehement. “I don’t, ah, smoke.”

  “Hardly anyone does,” Raenau said sadly. “Admiral Koffield? How about you?”

  Norla had been expecting a refusal as firm as her own, if perhaps a more diplomatic one. Instead, Anton Koffield got a strange, faraway look in his eye. “I haven’t had a proper cigar in twenty years subjective,” he said. “Nearly a century and a half, objective time.”

  “Cuban,” said Raenau, offering the box to Koffield.

  “Not Cuban seed grown twenty light-years from Earth, or

  Cuban-made from Texas leaf, or any of that nonsense. The

  real thing.” The tone of his voice made it plain he was try

  ing to tempt Koffield, but extolling the virtues of Cuba

  meant nothing to Norla.”

  “How the devil could you get true Cuban cigars out here?” Koffield asked, standing up and taking the box. He opened it and examined the contents with an expression that was almost reverent.

  “Let’s just say I have friends in low places. And shipping techniques have improved some while you’ve been, ah, out of circulation.”

  Koffield selected a cigar and handed the box back to Raenau, who put it carefully away. Koffield held the cigar under his nose and sniffed deeply, then held it to his ear and seem to listen to it for some reason, as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. Raenau produced a complicated-looking small gadget from his jacket pocket and handed it to Koffield, who used it to snip the end off the cigar. Raenau produced a second device from the same pocket, and Koffield had to puzzle over it for a second, before he got it to create a small jet of flame. He put the cigar in his mouth, and played the fire from the flame-maker over the far end of the cigar, while studiously sucking in his breath through the cigar.

  It took a good long while for this process to get the thing lit and burning to Koffield’s satisfaction, and then, of course, Raenau had to repeat the entire procedure in order to get his cigar going.

  It was plain that there was some sense of ritual about the whole thing, that Koffield had gained a lot of points with Raenau simply by understanding what to do, and because he appreciated the dubious pleasure of inhaling toxic fumes. Just as with making the floor vanish, the cigars had been a test. Of what, exactly, Norla was not sure—but it was clear that Koffield had passed with flying colors.

  “I don’t wish to be rude,” Norla lied. She damned well did want to be rude, to both of them. “But you did wish to see us urgently, and we have traveled quite a long way to get here, on what Admiral Koffield said he thought were important matters. Perhaps we could begin?”

  “You’re right,” said Raenau. “Let’s get on with it, and get that agenda cleared. I guess I just wanted to enjoy the moment, now that you two finally made it on in. I don’t know if you two realize it, but this moment, right now, marks the end of a mystery that’s lived on for a very long time. And I get to be the one who hears the answer first.”


  “I’ve afraid we’ve got some bad news on that score, Commander Raenau,” Koffield replied. “When we left her, no one aboard the Dom Pedro IV had any idea what went wrong, or how the ship malfunctioned. Nor do we understand how she could have made it here at all.”

  “No, no, you misunderstand me,” Raenau said. “What made your ship malfunction isn’t the mystery I care about, though others do. You’re the mystery that interests me. You, and the message we think you sent.”

  “What’s so special about us?” asked Chamdray. “We were aboard a ship that never arrived, and we’re certainly not the first ship that’s happened to.”

  “True enough.” Raenau shrugged. “There’s no one good reason I can give you for it. Some cases get famous, and others don’t. Something is strange enough, or bizarre enough, to seize the imagination. People invent conspiracies, or concoct explanations. There’s a strange detail that intrigues someone. A rumor, a story, takes on a life of its own. Something gets blown out of proportion. Probably the Chrononaut VI never coming back, and because Pulvrick died before she could deal with the message. Anyway, there’s a whole legend—a whole series of legends—that’s grown up around the loss of the Dom Pedro IV.”

  “So we’re famous?” Norla asked, amused by the idea.

  Raenau hesitated, obviously not quite sure how to reply.

  Koffield spoke into the silence. “Give it to us straight, Commander. Don’t be polite about it. We need information more than courtesy. If we’re supposed to be monsters with ten-centimeter fangs, tell us.”

  Raenau looked at Koffield in mild surprise. “Strange that being notorious is what you thought of first. Do you have a guilty conscience?”