The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

“All right, all right,” Raenau said. “I’m opening it.” He broke the sealers on the personal pack, undid the latches, swung open the lid, and stared down at the contents.

  The room was deathly silent for a time that could have been a single moment or a lifetime.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Raenau demanded. “Because I’ve got a station in crisis here. I’ve got no goddamned time for jokes and games.”

  Norla could see the age-faded, rust-stained interior padding in the case, and the carefully carved-out niches in the padding that had been meant to hold books and data-blocks.

  But there were no datablocks, no books. Nothing but a melted, compressed-together, crumbly lump of ancient waste plastic and corroded scrap metal, no doubt put in the case to mimic the weight of the things taken out.

  The report, the data files, the warning were gone, as lost as all the tens of thousands of yesterdays that had died since Anton Koffield had last closed his travel case.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Rude Awakenings

  Norla Chandray wandered the corridors of the Gondola, not knowing or caring where she went, so long as she did not return to her quarters. Her room was a tiny box of a place, but that was not the problem. She had lived half her life in space, in ships with all manner of small compartments. Small spaces did not bother her.

  Her room had a massive wall-of-glass window that looked out on the stomach-turning gyrations of the universe spiraling past the station, but even that was not a problem. A space pilot had to be accustomed to disorienting views. Besides, she could always set the windows to maximum opacity and close the blinds that had so obviously been installed after the room was built, when it was discovered that the view drove too many visitors to distraction.

  It was the sounds she could hear, and the sounds she might hear, that drove her away. Her quarters shared an obviously unsoundproofed wall with the next room over, where they had put Koffield. She had been with a shattered man when they left Raenau’s office. Numb, lost, ruined.

  It had been the quest, the crusade, the self-imposed mission that had propped him up and kept him going. It had kept him pushing forward in spite of all, and now it was gone. The task and duty that had been wrapped up into the center of his being had been reduced to nothing more than a crude practical joke, a travel case emptied out and weighted down for the amusement of some cruel and faceless stranger light-years away and a century in the past.She had watched him stumble into his own room, plainly unaware of where he was or what was happening. She had gone into her own tiny room and looked out at the ships and stars wheeling past the darkness. And then she had heard the bumps, the thuds, from next door.

  Maybe he was just been being a bit awkward opening up the fold-down furniture. Maybe he had tripped over something, or just slammed the bed open and then flung himself down on it a bit too hard, thrown off by the variable gravity.

  Or maybe it had been the first sounds made by a man going to pieces. Maybe next would come cries of anguish, curses, shouts, sobs, or, even worse, a brooding, empty silence onto which Norla could write anything she wished. Would silence mean a man staring out into the infinity beyond the glass wall, contemplating his own doom, and perhaps the means of causing it to happen? Or would it mean Koffield was sitting down to work out a new plan, or write his report again? Or would it simply mean he had fallen asleep?

  She did not want to know. Whatever sound or silence she heard from that room would be, at least to her, the most profound invasion of Koffield’s privacy, and Koffield was the most private man she had ever met. Whatever torments he was feeling, he had no need for an audience, and she had no desire to be one.

  And so, she had left. Now she wandered the glittering maze of corridors, the grand esplanades, the overdone public spaces of the Gondola, alone with her own losses, her own deprivations. This was not her world, or her time. All she had ever had, or had ever known, or ever done, and all the places she had ever been, were as lost to her as Koffield’s precious report, drowned long ago in the ocean of years.

  She felt herself adrift in that same ocean, and there was no safe harbor anywhere in sight. She felt half-drowned in time, adrift in the wrong world, the wrong lifetime, with no hope of rescue.

  She found herself back on the upper deck of the Gondola, below the massive overhead observation port, standing by the atrium that opened out on the.decks below. She leaned over the balustrade and stared down into the atrium and the people in the little park at its base. She caught a glimpse of herself, a tiny reflection in the mirror-perfect water in the pool below, with” the massive bulk of SCO Station visible behind and above her, through the big overhead viewport.

  She watched as a child knelt by the pool, stuck her hand in the water, and splashed it back and forth. The water-mirror warped and rippled and shimmered, and Norla watched as the image of her own reflection vanished into the suddenly chaotic surface below.

  That was all it would take, she thought. A chance ripple on the water, a capricious act, here and now, or long ago and far away, and then the waters would close over her, swallow her up in that ocean of years, and it would be as if she had never been at all. A quirk of fate had thrown them a hundred years into the future. A sick mind had sent Koffield across the endless light-years carrying a sealed container full of recycling debris. What casual, cruel, deliberate act, what totally random chance, might utterly destroy them all at any time?

  She turned away from the pool below, seeking a place where she would not see, or think, such things.

  As he lay on his back on the bed, there was some part of Anton Koffield, some hunter’s corner of his mind, that had noted the faint noises from the next compartment, and correctly interpreted them as Norla entering, then leaving, the room. There was even some tiny shred of his conscious self that guessed her motives, and was grateful.

  But it seemed to Anton Koffield as if those tiny bits of awareness and rational thought were all but lost to view in a storm of shock, dismay, and disbelief. how had it happened how had it happened how had it happened who did this who did this who did this why why why

  The questions gibbered up from the base of his skull, and Anton slammed his hands over his ears in a futile attempt to avoid hearing the soundless cries of panic that came from inside him.

  He let out a strangled moan and leapt to his feet. He kicked hard at the side of the bed, hard enough to set it swinging back up into its wall niche. He cursed loudly, so loudly that anger and frustration turned the profane words into little more than an incoherent howl of rage.

  The warning he had struggled so long to construct was gone, stolen, lost in the depths of time. Millions of people, tens of millions, perhaps billions, here and on other worlds, would die if they did not get that warning.

  He let it all out, let the emotions held in so long rip through him. He let the tears fall, let his arms wrap around his torso as if to ward off cold and danger, let himself slump to the floor and sit there, rocking back and forth, moaning.

  He knew it had to come out, had to, or else he would go mad. The tiny bit of him that held on to rationality, that kept itself as a cool and careful observer, knew that rationality could not save him. He was drowning in a nightmare, and to struggle against it would only bring the end sooner. Only by giving way, by letting the nightmare work its will on his psyche, and then moving on, would he be able to survive.

  Even as he sat, huddled in a corner, sobbing, rocking back and forth, crooning and moaning to himself, the cold, the hard, the determined scientist and tactician that was the core of Anton Koffield was operating by calculation.

  Let the demons out.

  Let them out, and then it will be time for you to move on, and fight and search again.

  A mad figure whimpered in the corner of the room, and a sane mind waited for the madness to be over.

  Raenau didn’t realize at first that his cigar had gone out. That in and of itself would have been a sure sign, to anyone who knew him, of just how distracted he was.

  But
there was no one there to see. Raenau sat alone at his desk, in his absurd fishbowl of an office. The lights were low, and the chamber was deathly quiet. The recessed display screen set into his desktop had three or four items blinking, their priority codes flashing urgently. The screen built in the decorative room divider showed the same high-priority items, plus a dozen or more less pressing things.

  Raenau saw none of the action items, saw none of the room, saw nothing at all.

  Obviously the man was crazy. Brains must have frozen up for good in cryo. All that foolishness with the secured container. What the devil had he been playing at?

  Maybe it was a hoax, a prank, a publicity stunt. Maybe the man was an impostor.

  But if he had been a fake, the contents of that secured container would have been chock-full of all sorts of fascinating, believable information, instead of a decaying wad of compressed metal and plastic. Or was it all part of some deeper scheme, some wildly complex confidence trick that Raenau couldn’t begin to unravel? But could that be?

  Everything checked out, from the type, vintage, and serial number of the Cruzeiro do Sul to the retinal and DNA scans performed by Raenau’s own equipment.

  At last Raenau looked up, but only to see something that wasn’t there. The blood-red, urgent notice that had glared down from the top of his action list, and from the action list of his predecessors for a century and more. Gone.

  For a hundred and twenty-seven years, that message had shouted out that this man, this fossil marooned in the wrong century, was a person who should be heard. The red letters had urged generations of station managers to listen to Anton Koffield. Surely that was worth a certain degree of consideration.

  Raenau worked his desk control and brought up a copy of the preliminary report Koffield had sent so long ago— or at least claimed to have sent. He scrolled through it one more time, though he barely needed to do so. He was close to having it memorized.

  His office Artlnt controlled every copy of the report. Koffield had been too stunned even to think of asking for one. All Raenau had to do was enter a few commands and confirmations, and all the copies of the report, primary, backup, and tertiary, would be erased, purged. It would vanish as if it had never been.

  It was a tempting thought. His hand moved toward the proper controls.

  But damn all stars, it was too easy. Make the report go away, and pretend it never happened. Pretend things were as they should be. What sort of way to run things was that?

  Pretending like that, generations of it, was what had gotten Solace into a mess in the first place. And, Raenau realized, he no longer wanted any part of the pretense.

  He hadn’t set his office walls and floors to full transparency for months, not until he had played his little games with Koffield and Chandray. Now he set them to clear for the second time in one day. The silver walls faded away, and the stars and the skies and the wounded world of Solace revealed themselves to Karlin Raenau.

  He stood up and walked thoughtfully around his desk, to the edge of the thick carpet that surrounded it, and stepped out onto the solid nothingness of the floor itself. He had made a show of standing on nothing in front of Chandray and Koffield, but it had taken all his nerve to do it without seeming to be bothered.

  Now, with no audience to play to, it was even harder. But Raenau was somehow certain he had to stand here on his own. He had to look down, to see what was there. He had to face it, and not pretend.

  The universe rolled past beneath his feet. Once, twice, three times, the face of Solace wheeled past, and he looked on her, and forced himself to see what was there, and not look away, or tell himself that it was minor, was temporary, would heal.

  He thought of all his trips to the surface, and what he saw when he let himself see what was honestly there. The stands of dying trees. The weed-choked parks overrun with destructive insects. The fields where no bird sang. The farms populated by spindly-looking cattle and under-size poultry.

  Solace wheeled once more out of sight, and Raenau looked up into the black ceiling full of clever machinery and hidden devices. In his mind’s eye, he saw his own domain. The station itself, forever hidden, always invisible from the office from which it was run.

  “Master of all I don’t survey,” Raenau whispered to himself. “Ruler of all I don’t see.” The joke wasn’t funny anymore. In his imagination, he swept away the madly extravagant Gondola, all of DeSilvo Tower, and saw the station itself. There she was, cluttered with the wealth of trade, commerce, industry, and yet overrun by the poor and desperate. He saw the jewel of Ring Park hidden by the smoke and dirt of the gluefeet, the refugees, the people who had fled something worse.

  And if Solace was not in trouble, what the hell were all those people running from?

  Damn all stars, but there it was. Maybe Koffield was insane. Maybe he was even a fraud, putting over an incredible con job by means and for reasons Raenau could not even imagine.

  But, for all of that—Koffield was right. The planet was dying, and dying almost exactly on the schedule predicted by Koffield’s preliminary report.

  And that was the thing they all had to see. Raenau, NeshobeKalzant, Jorl Parrige, the scientists on Greenhouse, everybody.

  Karlin Raenau returned to his desk and sat down. A cover letter, an introduction. He had to attach something to Koffield’s report to explain what it was and where it had come from.

  It was something to work on, something to focus on.

  Raenau noticed at last that his cigar had gone out. He relit it carefully, and then set to work, puffing on his smoke as he did.

  Anthon the Terrible.

  Yuri Sparten’s eyes snapped open, and he sat bolt upright in bed. Anthon the Terrible. Of course. Every Glistern refugee, every descendant of folk from Glister, knew that name. Parents used it to frighten their children into behaving. Do as you’re told, or Anthon will come for you tonight. There was even a nursery rhyme.

  Terrible Anthon closed up the sky Horrible Anthon made Glister die Closed up the sky, made Glister die, Made Glister die, no ship could fly Hideous Anthon closed up the sky

  Anthon was a boogeyman, a monster made half from muddled history and half from legend. Yuri hadn’t ever considered Anthon as anything more than that. Anthon was a piece of folklore, the past. Never had Yuri thought of Anthon as a real flesh-and-blood man.

  Until today.

  Anthon was a common name in Settled Space, and one with many cognates and local variants. Antonio, Anthonius, Nathan—and Anton. In similar vein, there were lots of Kerfields, Kolfeldts, Colfelts, and so on out there. Neither name, in any variant, was used among the Glistern community, of course. Not anymore.

  But, throughout Settled Space, variants of a given name were often altered to match local usage, customs, and spellings. Histories tended to follow local variants.

  Yuri got out of bed and went to his desk. He activated the reference links and searched the Glister history files.

  Anthon the Terrible, see Kolfeldt, Anthon.

  It could still be chance. Coincidence. He had to check more closely. He ran a further search and starting working through the results.

  Yuri flitted impatiently from one reference page to another, starting down two or three blind alleys, discussions of the events, rather than the man behind them. At last he came to a brief biography of the man himself.

  Kolfeldt, Anthon. var. sp. for Koffield, Anton. Officer, Chronologic Patrol, final rank achieved, reserve rear admiral...

  But Yuri read no more. A picture had come up with the bio, a head-and-shoulders shot, a slightly overenhanced, grainy, contrasty image from somewhere or other. A.picture of the man who, thirteen decades ago, had stranded the ships whose loss had meant the immediate failure of a dozen terraforming projects, because the equipment and supplies to save them was destroyed along with the ships. The man who had prevented the rescue of thousands of innocents by destroying the ships that would have carried them.

  A picture of the man who thus caused the
ultimate collapse, five decades after the stranding, of Glister’s entire ecology.

  A picture of the man he had welcomed aboard the station not twelve hours before.

  Milos Vandar tossed and turned in his bed, and moaned in his sleep. He dreamed of his work, of Lake Virtue and the fight against the algae. Some sort of buoy floated on the lake, ringing out with an echoing bong, bong, bong as it rocked back and forth. Milos was in the water, in the lake, somehow, fighting against the algae. He pushed it back, forced it away.

  But the algae mats were fighting back, determinedly pounding their way back into the parts of the lake he had chased them out of. There was, somehow, a wall in the water. It was behind him, just out of sight, always behind him, no matter how he turned and looked behind himself. Somehow, the biggest algae mat had formed itself into a fist, a club, and was pounding against the wall.

  Far off, above him, on the surface of the lake, he could still hear the sepulchral tolling of the buoy-bell, ringing its warning over and over. The wall he could not see was weakening, splitting open, and the killer algae that had choked all the life out of Lake Virtue were about to burst through it, pounding on his apartment door and leaning hard on the annunciator, just about ringing it off the wall, and the neighbors were bound to hear it, soundproofing or no soundproofing....

  Milos Vandar swam up from the depths of his dream-lake, from the depths of sleep, toward the surface of wakefulness and a damnably loud pounding on his door. The annunciator went off again, and its mournful bong, bong bong echoed through the apartment. Milos swore to himself and made a mental note, not for the first time, to adjust the annunciator, and have it make some more cheerful sound than that. Every time it went off, it made Milos think of funerals.

  He stumbled out of bed, found a lounging cloak to drape over himself, and walked, a bit unsteadily, toward the door. Whoever was pounding on it seemed to think something was dreadfully urgent. Probably some lab assistant in a panic because a sample had gone bad. He resisted the urge to mutter something along the lines of “all right, all right, I’m coming.” No point in it, considering how thick the door was and how much noise his visitor was making out there.