He palmed the lock plate and the door slid out of the way. Milos was surprised and alarmed to find, not a panicked grad student, but a beefy-looking pair of men in severe-looking dark grey uniforms. Milos did not recognize their insignia.
“You’re Milos Vandar,” the larger of the two men said, as if that in and of itself was crime enough to justify arrest. “Come with us. Now.”
“What?”
“You’re to come with us. Now.”
The bigger man took Milos by the arm, and pulled him forward. Not enough to hurt or enough to knock Milos off his feet, but just enough for Milos to know the other man’s strength, and what he could do if he chose.
“But—I—it’s—” Milos tried to speak, but could not find the words.
“Ease up, Wint,” the smaller man—though he was only slightly smaller—said, speaking for the first time. “Let him at least get dressed first.”
“Yes, please,” Milos said. “Let me at least get dressed.” Astonishing. He had heard of the ancient game of good cop, bad cop many times, and here it was. Even knowing it was, or at least probably was, just a trick, a way to intimidate him, it was still working on him.
“All right,” Wint said in a grudging tone of voice, as if letting a man put his pants on was a vast concession, something that went against all his principles. “But make it fast. And keep an eye on him.” He let go of Milos’s arm and gestured for him to get moving.
“I, ah, ah, keep my clothes in the bedroom closet,” Milos said apologetically, as if he knew it was rude of him not to keep a change of clothes handy there by the door, for the convenience of any secret-police arrest team that happened to stop by in the middle of the night. “I have to go get them.”
“Go with him, Syd,” Wint told his companion. “Watch him.”
It was not until Milos had dressed himself, been led outside, and none-too-gently ushered into his visitors’ waiting vehicle that it dawned on him to wonder what it was all about. No doubt that was part of their standard technique as well—keep the subject, or victim, as off-balance as possible. Get him to feel intimidated, and he won’t have courage enough to cause you any trouble.
By the time he had recovered himself enough to ask what was happening, it was far too late. The two police officers—if they were police officers—sat impassively in the aircar, Wint next to Milos, and Syd in the forward, rear-facing seat. It was obvious neither of them was going to answer questions. Milos found he did not have the courage to ask them anything, in any event.
The military-grade aircar, its windows fully opacified, its blast shutters down, lifted off and flew out of the covered parking area by Milos’s house, and on toward wherever it was going. The ever-present rain commenced banging and rattling off the roof of the car the moment it cleared the carport and flew off into the dark, but Milos barely noticed. His fearful imagination was too busy launching out on journeys of its own.
He remembered the stories of what had happened on planets that had gone through bad ecocrises—Go-Down, Glister, Far Haven, and even, in the dim past, Earth herself.The same pattern held on the big habitats and domed colonies, for that matter. When the physical climate went to hell, the political climate deteriorated as well. When things started to go seriously wrong, sooner or later someone would decide the situation called for stern measures, powerful leadership, harsh discipline. In short, dictatorship. Arrest the dissidents, or better still, shoot the scientists, the messengers who brought the bad news.
Had it started here? Had he said something, found something, proved something that the authorities did not like? Was he the only one, the first one to be swept up? Or were the skies full of aircars like this one tonight, flitting back and forth between the homes of the innocent and the headquarters of whoever it was who had just retroactively declared thinking or speaking certain things to be crimes?
All questions he dared not ask. Milos rode in silence and waited for the trip to be over, and the nightmare to begin.
The aircar pitched its nose down and decelerated. They were about to arrive at their destination, wherever that was. It hadn’t been a long trip. Was that a good sign, or not?
The deceleration stopped. As best as Milos could tell, the car had gone into a stationary hover. Then there was a shift in the low hum of the aircar’s engines, and Milos felt the car moving slowly forward. The sound of the rain on the car roof faded away, and the timbre of the engine sound changed. They were in a covered, enclosed space, a garage or hangar of some kind, inside whatever sort of compound or complex it was.
Milos wondered if he had already seen his last of the outside world. Were they about to bundle him into some dark interior cell, never to be allowed to emerge?
Wint checked a status panel, nodded, and punched the open code into the door lock. The car door clamshelled up and out of the way, and Wint the bad cop stepped out. Milos followed, somewhat hesitantly, with Syd, the good cop, urging him on.
They were in a gloomy, anonymous, completely undistinguished covered parking garage for aircars. There were dozens just like it throughout the city. The place was utterly empty except for Milos, his guards, and the car that had brought them. A few lights gleamed here and there, and directory signs pointed to upper and lower levels. If there were any clues to his whereabouts to be gleaned from small details, Milos was far too distracted and disturbed to take any notice of them.
Wint and Syd gave him very little time to take in his surroundings. They immediately marched him off toward a passenger lift a few steps from where the aircar sat. The doors closed the moment they were inside, and the car started moving at once, without anyone pushing a button or speaking a command.
The lift car moved up, and that gave Milos at least some hope. They were not taking him down to any subterranean bunker. Up was good. Up at least meant the hope of windows and light.
Or else, of course, it meant nothing at all. Milos abandoned his effort to find meaning. Short ride or long ride, elevator up or down—such things were meaningless with no context. No sense guessing in the absence of data. He would know more soon enough—unless, of course, they never told him anything at all.
The lift came to a halt, the doors opened, and the three of them stepped out into a distinctly unsinister corridor. The lights were at a dim setting, and it was difficult to make out the placards on the doors. The two guards ranged themselves on either side of Milos, each holding him by a forearm. They led him down the hallway toward a pair of larger double doors that retracted into the walls before he could read the lettering on them.
They swept through a reception area and down an interior hallway. The guards stopped at a certain door that slid open at their approach. They shoved Milos into the room. The door slid shut behind him, leaving the guards in the corridor.
Milos was alone in a small, windowless box of a room. Even in his disoriented and terrified state, it was plain to him that the room had never been intended as a cell, or a prison. It had more of the look of a never-used storeroom, or perhaps a work cube for a low-ranking office drone.
But rooms had been put to uses other than those intended, now and again. Perhaps all the proper cells were already full to bursting, and the coup leaders were forced to use whatever rooms they could find to hold their numberless prisoners.
There was a plain, slightly battered-looking worktable in the center of the room, and two equally battered metal chairs, one positioned to face the door, the other facing the opposite way. For want of anything else to do, Milos sat down in the chair that faced the door. He folded his hands together on the tabletop and stared at the door, waiting for someone, anyone, to show up and tell him what was going on.
He did not have long to wait. Ten minutes after his arrival, the door slid open and then shut behind a thin, almost emaciated-looking man who stood there, staring at Milos. The newcomer was holding a flat-read panel in his hand. He had a strange expression on his face, almost as if he had caught Milos breaking some sort of rule, and was deciding whether or n
ot to call him to account for the infraction. There was something familiar about him. He looked as if he belonged in the background, rather than front and center. Milos felt certain he had seen him in the back of a crowd, or with someone else.
“There you are, Dr. Vandar,” the man said, as if he had been looking all over for him, and Milos had kept him waiting. “So glad you finally got here.”
Milos looked at the man. He had come up against his sort many a time in the past—a petty functionary who worried about the rules more than the point of the rules. Milos had learned the hard way that the best way to deal with such people was to let them think they’d won. Quite automatically, he sat up straighter, took his hands off the table, and tried to look suitably apologetic. “I’m afraid I didn’t know I was expected.”
The newcomer looked irritated, and the lines of his face fell naturally into the expression. “How much did they tell you? The men who collected you and brought you here?”
“Nothing at all.”
“You don’t know why you’re here?” the man asked, sitting down in the other chair at the table. It was plain from his attitude that he had seen Milos before and expected to be recognized. The two of them had met, and recently. Milos dared not risk insulting the man by asking who he was.
Milos shook his head hopelessly. “No. Perhaps something about my work met with your—disapproval?”
“Disapproval? On the contrary. You’re here because of the high quality of your work at Lake Virtue.” Suddenly, the light went on. Milos knew who his inquisitor was. Aither Friable—no, Fribart, that was it. Fribart, Jorl Parrige’s assistant. Once he thought back to that day, Fribart fell into place in his memory. The assistant, the spear-carrier, the one at the back of the crowd.
What the devil was a nonentity like Fribart doing in the middle of a palace coup? And what did Lake Virtue have to do with it? What would a coup want with biologists? “Has—has Senyor Parrige taken over?” Milos asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Is it a takeover? A coup? Has your—ah, boss—taken over? Was he the one who ordered me to be arrested, or brought in, or whatever you want to call it?”
Fribart now looked not only annoyed, but confused. “Coup? Arrest? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I sent two men around to ask you to come down here and give us your opinion on an urgent matter, that’s all.”
“I see,” Milos said, though he was far from clear on the situation. Either Fribart was being disingenuous in the extreme, or else there was a lot going on in Parrige’s name that Fribart—and Parrige—did not know about. But at least it seemed there was no coup, and it was seeming a great deal more likely that Milos would be able to walk out of the room a free man. “The men who didn’t arrest me likewise didn’t tell me about any such urgent matter,” he said.”They had no knowledge of it,” Fribart said impatiently. “But let us not get lost in side issues. Are you willing to help us or not?”
Milos Vandar thought of himself as a mild-mannered and reasonable person. But he also imagined that he had something of a spine—especially when facing a jumped-up bureaucrat, rather than the secret police. “You make it sound like you’ve asked nicely a dozen times already,” he said. “What’s really happened is that the two thugs you sent out woke me up, dragged me out of bed, scared the hell out of me, and brought me here without telling me where I was going or why. Then you come in and bite my head off for not performing a service you haven’t even asked for. I don’t call that the best way to convince me to help you. So unless you can do better, I’ll be on my way.”
He began to stand, and was already halfway out of his chair before Fribart spoke in a flat, hard voice. “Sit down, Vandar,” he said. “Now.”
“I have no intention of—”
“Dr. Vandar. Please. Sit down.” An odd change came over his host. Fribart shuddered, visibly, and it was as if a wall had been knocked down, a wall of official conduct and hard-edged rules and disapproval of all nonregulation behavior. Behind all that, Fribart’s face took on an expression, and his voice took on emotion, that had not been there before. Quite suddenly, Milos was looking at and listening to, not an annoyed clerk with too much power, but an intelligent, frightened, alarmed human being. “Please,” Fribart said again. “Please accept my sincere apologies for your treatment tonight, but I must insist you stay and hear me out. Afterward, you can do what you like.” Fribart gestured toward Vandar’s chair, and waited until Milos was seated again.
“All right,” Milos said, “talk.”
Fribart paused for a moment before he went on. “There’s an old saying, Dr. Vandar, that says you should never attribute to malevolence anything that could be caused by incompetence. Tonight we’ve gone one better. Please, I ask you—don’t attribute to incompetence actions that were caused by blind panic. Something’s come up. Something that’s scared the living daylights out of everyone who has seen it. That is, I’m sure, why they pulled you in like a common criminal. The people who gave them their orders— including me—were scared silly, and made the mistake of letting it show.”
He put the flat-read panel on the table, but did not take his hand off it. “SCO Station sent down this report about five hours ago. You’re not alone. We’ve pulled in people from half a dozen disciplines to examine every angle on it. Linguistics people to match writing style. Nav and ballistics and ships’ captains to see if this ship, the Dom Pedro whatever-number-it-is, could really have made the flight she’s supposed to have made. Artlnt people to confirm that the report has been left unaltered since it was put in encrypted storage. We’re checking every angle we can think of on it.”
“On what?” Milos demanded. “Tell me what this is about.”
Fribart looked at Milos and sighed wearily. “It’s a complicated story, but what it boils down to is this: This report is supposed to be from over a hundred years ago. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Other people are checking that part of it out. In any event it was opened and read by the SCO Station commander today. It predicts the last hundred or so years of the history of the terraformed Solacian environment, and its current state, with alarming accuracy. More alarming still because of what it says will happen in future. What we need you to check is the science. The report describes the methodology used to derive the predictions. It involves some highly complex math, and specialized knowledge. The report, I might add, discusses further proofs and more detailed methodology that the writer would bring with him. Those proofs and details have been lost. This report is all we have, and all we’re going to have. We need you to look at it and tell us if it’s for real. Tell us if the math and the science and theory are legitimate, or just real-sounding fakes. Because unless they are frauds, this planet is in trouble.”
Fribart shoved the flat-reader across the table toward Milos and pulled his hand away from it sharply, as if he had been eager to cease touching it and was glad to get rid of it. And with that, whatever had changed in Fribart, changed back. The walls went back up, and the human personality was lost to view again. Whatever it had cost him to let down his shields, he did not choose to leave them down for long. “So,” Fribart said, his voice back to its old tone of aggrieved bureaucratic virtue, “does all that meet with your definition of a damned-good reason?”
“Yeah,” Milos replied. “Yeah, I guess it does.” He took up the flat-reader, reluctant to take it up, just as Fribart had been glad to get rid of it.
He started to read.
SOLACE
CHAPTER NINETEEN View from a Diamond
“And that brings us to the last point,” said Wandella Ashdin.
“Very good,” said Neshobe. She was more than glad to hear the end was in sight. Ashdin was supposed to be a superb historian and researcher, but her technique for giving a report—if such massive disorganization could be dignified with the term technique—was enough to drive anyone to distraction.
“Yes,” Ashdin said in vague reply. “The last point. Admiral Koffield reported Dr. DeSiivo’s te
mporary death by heart failure. Now let me see ...” Neshobe Kalzant, and indeed everyone else in the room, watched with ill-disguised impatience as Wandella Ashdin searched through her excessively copious notes once again. “Yes. Here we are. Insofar as confirming Admiral Koffield’s bona fides, it is a very useful detail. It dovetails very neatly with what we know of Dr. DeSiivo’s movements and activities during that time, and indeed fills in one of the major lacunae in our knowledge of his life. Dr. DeSilvo was a most private person, and he kept his medical history as quiet as possible. I’ve learned that whenever I come across a period of his life that is completely blank, with no record of any kind of his actions, it almost always turns out that the doctor had been taken ill, and elected to withdraw himself from public view, quite often having himself placed in temporal confinement while treatment was prepared. The admiral’s report exactly matches one of the largest remaining lacunae in the DeSilvo chronology. Even the mention of heart-replacement failure matches up with what I have from third-party and secondary sources of one sort or another. I could provide you with greater detail on those if you would like to—”
“I’m sure that’s not necessary,” Neshobe said hurriedly. “You’ve been quite thorough enough already.”
“Why, thank you, ma’am,” Ashdin replied, plainly missing Neshobe’s not-very-well-hidden sarcasm.
“Not at all,” Neshobe said absently. She let out a sigh and rubbed her face with both hands. Ashdin had been the last of the experts to report, as well as the longest-winded, and it had already been a long meeting, and a long morning, before Ashdin had started. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Neshobe said, “but I need a break. Would anyone object if I ordered some refreshments brought in?”
No one, of course, objected. It was one advantage to being Planetary Executive. You could take your breaks whenever you wanted. “Service system,” Neshobe said, addressing the Mansion’s Artlnt network. “Meeting break refreshments, to be brought in, now.”
The Depths of Time Page 36
