The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Ah, no, Madam Executive.”

  “Do you in fact believe they are who they say they are?” Neshobe was quite deliberately presenting her questions in a form that made them almost a ritual incantation, a call-and-response of the age-old pattern. Neshobe wanted Ashdin, and all the others, to hear that formal tone, and understand the seriousness of the situation. “Answer carefully. Are they who they say they are?”

  Ashdin swallowed nervously. “Yes, Madam Executive. They are. All evidence points that way, and nothing refutes it.”

  “Very well.” It was time to move forward, but Neshobe realized that she had to give herself a moment. They were at a. key branch point, a decision cusp. If Koffield was Koffield, and if the checkable parts of what he had to say about the past and present were true, and if his science and math were reliable, and if it all matched the climatic disaster she could see just by looking out of the Diamond Room’s oversize windows, then—

  Then it would be Glister all over again. She picked up her scriber and doodled a meaningless pattern of squares and inscribed circles on her datapage, then cleared the screen. She let out her breath, not realizing that she had been holding it in, and set down her scriber.

  She looked up at the circle of expectant faces and nodded to no one in particular. “Very well,” she said again. She looked toward Koffield and Chandray and smiled mean-inglessly at them. “I’m convinced. You are who you say you are, and you’re telling the truth. I have no doubt that the simple act of looking into everything you’ve told us will give us a great deal more opportunity to check your story, and we’ll check it directly every way we can. On a matter this grave, this serious, that goes without saying. But I believe you, and I have no doubt that all our subsequent checks will confirm your information.”

  Neshobe paused once again and drummed her fingers on the table. Plainly she had to ask Koffield the next question, but she could not bring herself to do it. She needed to hear the truth, but she was unwilling to hear it from the oracle himself. It would be easier, at least a trifle easier, to hear it from the messenger, from the local man. She turned to Milos Vandar.

  “Dr. Vandar,” she said, “you have studied Admiral Koffield’s material, and you are as familiar as anyone with the current health of the planetary climate. Not so long ago you seemed to believe there was at least hope we could repair the ecosystem, rebuild it, and move forward. But now you have seen the admiral’s work. Has it changed your mind that completely? To the point where you are certain there is no chance whatsoever for the planet to recover?”

  Vandar smiled wearily. “It used to be—last week, yesterday—that the scientists in the fields of ecologic management and climate research and biodesign and biomech and so on told each to avoid the word certainty,” he said. “We tell ourselves—told ourselves—that all things—or at least many things—are possible, however unlikely. And, in a sense, that’s still true. An ecosystem is a dynamic process. It ebbs and flows, weakens itself and renews itself over and over again. A fully robust ecosystem, such as Earth’s, can recover, rebuild itself. Earth’s ecosystem has the capacity to absorb change, survive it, rebound from it, and has done so many times. It is at least imaginable that Solace might do the same. But there is a big difference between something being scientifically possible on the one hand, and remotely probable in the real world on the other. Having seen the admiral’s work, I’d have to say that the probability of climatic recovery is near zero, no matter how hard we try. I’d put the odds at about the same as this room being struck by lightning in the next ten minutes. If we restrict ourselves to reasonable, realistic possibilities, then we must accept that the planetary ecosystem of Solace no longer has the capacity for short-term renewal— if it ever did.”

  Jorl Parrige spoke up. “I gather, Admiral, that you’re not simply talking about short-term renewal, are you?” he asked. Neshobe could not help but note that Parrige had no fear of facing the oracle directly.

  Koffield shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not, Senyor Parrige. But if my model is reasonably accurate, and if the data is reasonably good, then what they tell us is that there no longer is a ‘long term’ to worry about.” He lifted his hands off the table, and gestured with them, palms up, empty-handed, helpless. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Parrige, then to Neshobe, then to the rest of the table. “It is a painful fact, but a fact nonetheless. You must regard the terraforming of Solace to be a failure. The planet is going to die.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY For Want of a Nail

  Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez sat in the captain’s chair of the Dom Pedro IVs command center and glared menacingly at the message screen, as if scowling at the words presented there could scare them into revealing more information.

  Friendly contact made with local officials. Departing for groundside meeting with Planetary Executive, scheduled for 0900 hours tomorrow, Solace City time.

  Intended contents of secured container appear to have been deliberately removed prior to DP-IV’s departure from Solar System, motive and perpetrator unknown.

  Local situation difficult but peaceful, local officials cooperative. Estimate of danger to DP-IV in event that ship reveals itself: minimal. Estimate of general situation: short-term stable, estimate approx level four to five on Drachma pol-mil-econ stability scale. No immediate political, military crisis pending. Long-term prospects poor.

  Koffield badly shaken by learning of item (2) when container opened. His mental state could be of vital importance in discussions with PlanEx.

  Re: agenda: safety of ship and cargo. Estimate: low/acceptable risk of approaching inner system.

  Re: agenda: legal status of ship under current Solace law. Library search and legal services Artlnt referral confirm ownership and property rights undisturbed by DP-IVs mishap.

  Re: agenda: market for goods. Unable to perform useful research thus far. Many items in manifest may have antique value. Your large-scale hardware likely to be quite valuable. Koffield speculates there may be need for rapid spaceside habitat construction.

  All systems nominal aboard Lighter Cruzeiro do Sul. Lighter docked and secured inside SCO Station, with result onboard comm systems are blocked by station itself. This message transmitted as omnidirectional radio blip patched through SCO Station Services. Estimate local crypto capability highly advanced. Must therefore assume this transmission monitored. Secure comm impossible at this time.

  Events moving fast. Will report as developments merit and opportunity allows.

  Chandray

  Damn the woman! A very nice, professional signal, sent in the standard top-down prioritized format, and yet she had still managed to fill the message with absurd melodrama and cryptic details that produced more questions than answers. What, precisely, were they talking about with the PlanEx? And how was it that Koffield’s state of mind was so important? Marquez did not wish the man ill, but surely there were more important things in the world than what mood Koffield was in.

  Or had Chandray learned something from Koffield, something Koffield had not seen fit to reveal to Marquez? Something that magnified Koffield’s importance?

  And how in God’s name had they managed to get a meeting with the Planetary Executive so fast? Marquez checked the timestamp on the message. It had come in hours ago, while he was asleep. By now, if he had worked out the time zones properly, she and Koffield were already in their meeting with the PlanEx.

  What were they doing there? Marquez felt frustrated, cut off—and it did his mood no good to remind himself that he had been the one who decided to have the Dom Pedro IV lie low and hide on the outskirts of the Solacian system.

  And what of Koffield’s secured container? Who the devil had pilfered its contents, and why? Marquez now had direct evidence of two separate acts of sabotage against his ship. Were they connected? Were more surprises going to jump out at them? Who had done these things, and why?

  He needed to know more, a great deal more—but it was plain he wasn’t going to find it out sittin
g where he was. And even if Chandray hadn’t been clear on many subjects, it was plain she felt it at least reasonably safe to bring the ship in. It was time to start readying the Dom Pedro IV for a trip to the inner system. Marquez had known before Chandray’s message that the ship would have to head in sooner or later, or else be permanently marooned where she was. But he was a merchant captain, not an explorer. He had no desire to venture into the unknown world of the future that waited in the inner system. Still, it was plain he had no other choice.

  There was something else that had him agitated as he set about the job of ordering the ship made ready for the trip. Agendas. Chandray had mentioned several in her message, and all of them were Marquez’s, things he had told her to look out for, and check on.

  • But which of those agendas, if any of them, were hers? What was on the top of her list, her priority? Marquez felt sure it was no longer the ship. That much was plain from the way she had ordered the paragraphs of the message.

  So. what was most important to her now?

  When the, time came for action, what, precisely, would Norla Chandray decide to do? And whom would she be working for?

  “Next!” The clerk looked up from her desk to take a cursory glance at yet another freeloading gluefoot looking to leave SCO Station and run back home to dirtside, to the planet Solace. Policy was to send ‘em back as soon as possible and give the tickets free. Much as the clerk wanted to get rid of all the gluefeet, making things that easy didn’t sit right with her. They had messed up SCO Station—her station, her home. They ought to be made to pay for that, somehow.

  The gluefoot taking his seat in front of her desk smiled at her. “Hello,” he said. He was a young-looking man, and the gluefeet were nearly all farmers who aged fast. He couldn’t be much more than a kid. His clothes were worn-out and shabby, but someone had made an effort to patch them up and clean them. His face had gotten a good scrubbing, and his hair had been more or less combed into place. He had tried. That counted for something.

  “Name,” she snapped, shoving all such gentle thoughts from her mind. No point in being sympathetic.

  “Elber,” he said. “Elber Malloon.”

  Her desktop Artlnt popped up his file on her screen. “Traveling with wife Jassa and daughter Zari?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you want to go back now?” she asked, echoing the words she had heard a dozen dozen times that morning from the endless parade of gluefoot refugees. “As soon as possible, transport to spaceport closest to your home village?”

  “No,” said Malloon. “No, thank you, but that’s not it.”

  The clerk- looked at him sharply. “What? Why not? Why are you here then?”

  “Well,” said Malloon, “I want to stay, stay here on SCO. I want to see if there’s a way to do that.”

  “We can’t keep you here for free forever,” she said.

  “No. I know that,” he said. “I’d work. Anywhere, at anything. Jassa and me, we’ve talked it over. Staying here has got to be better than going back home. Home isn’t there anymore. And if we built a new farm, again—what about the next flood, and the next drought?”

  “So you want to stay here,” said the clerk, staring at him in wonderment. None of them wanted to stay. Home, home, home was all she ever heard. She wasn’t used to finding one who asked to stay, let alone work. She wasn’t even sure she had the right forms where she could get at them.As for work—the gluefoot crisis had left SCO Station a shambles, and the labor shortage was bad, much as her department was unwilling to admit it. It was going to take a lot of work to clean it up again. Enough work for this fellow, and his wife, and his daughter, once she was old enough. “Any job you could get here wouldn’t be pretty or easy. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I was a farmer,” Malloon said calmly. “That’s about as hard a job as there is. I can do your work.”

  Was a farmer. They all came through saying “I am a farmer,” or “I am a grain shipper,” refusing to let go of what they no longer had, no longer were. But this fellow said was. That counted for something too. Her sympathies were floating back up toward the surface, and this time she made little effort to force them back down. “If you get a work contract, it will be for two years at least,” she warned. “You’ll have to remain on the station until the contract is over. No changing your mind and deciding you just have to go home six months from now.”

  “I won’t,” said Elber Malloon. “That’s why I’m here right now. Because I won’t do that. Because I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?” the clerk demanded.

  “Because my home’s not there anymore,” he said quietly. “Even where it was isn’t there anymore. It’s washed away, a meter under water. We checked on the info-feeds. The waters never drained. They’re never going to.” He looked at her face, reading her expression. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We don’t have a home anymore, and I don’t think the uppers will let us settle anyplace good enough for me to start over. I’m not sure there are any places left on Solace that are good enough. So that’s why we need to stay. For our daughter.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Well, her old home is gone, and it’s not coming back. So it’s simple.” Elber Malloon gestured at the clerk’s office, at all of SCO Station. “We need to build Zari a new home,” he said. “And not on the planet. Out here, where it’s safe.”

  The planet is going to die. The words echoed in Neshobe’s head, and in the quiet that filled the room. There was no sound except for the muffled drumming of rain on the transparent roof of the Diamond Room.

  The planet is going to die. She had known it before Koffield had spoken, of course. In a sense, she had known it for quite a long time, deep inside. It had been so long since anything had gone right, since any victory had been anything other than brief, or transitory. But she had never dared speak the words, or even think them, until now. The planet is going to die. Now the words had been spoken. It was no longer possible to hide from them. Now her only choices were to deny the reality of those words, or else to deal with their consequences. “How long have we got?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “How soon until the planet is uninhabitable?”

  She did not know Koffield at all. But his motionlessness was as expressive as any gesture could have been. He sat there, silent and unmoving as a tomb, as he considered his answer.

  “No one knows, Madam Executive,” he said at last. “My mathematical model is not wholly my own, as you know. The parts that deal with endgame chaos, the final dissolution of a system, and the unraveling of balances— those are based almost entirely on previous work. What I can say about them is that they are extremely sensitive to initial conditions—and the initial conditions will be wildly unpredictable. It is far easier to predict the behavior of a stable system. What you’re asking for is the behavior of a system as it is becoming unstable, chaotic. The slightest change in any of a dozen variables now could have dramatic and unpredictable effects years from now.”

  “Don’t just leave it at that,” Neshobe said. “You’ve come here to tell me the planet is doomed. You’ve got to have some sort of idea, some gut feeling. Give me something.”

  Koffield frowned deeply, then shook his head. “It’s impossible to be definite. We did a quick estimate this morning, plugging Dr. Vandar’s new data into my old model. It suggests that we’ll start to see the partial pressure of oxygen decline rapidly. There will be a linked, though not precisely proportionate, increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. The baseline projection is that it will start in something like ten Solacian years. That’s an extremely uncertain number. It might start to happen in five years, or might not start for fifteen, or even twenty. Perhaps the process has already started, but we haven’t detected it yet. We should be able to refine the estimate with better data. I can’t give you a better answer than that.”

  Neshobe looked steadily at him. “Try,” she said. “I’m not looking for absolute precision. I w
ant a general idea. A drop in oxygen levels is bad, but how bad? Should we measure the time we have left in centuries? Decades? Years?” Or months? she asked herself. Perhaps days, if word gets out and the exodus riots start up again.

  Koffield shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The planet will certainly become increasingly inhospitable in the coming few years, and the process will snowball, feeding on itself and accelerating. That much is certain. What we don’t know is how fast it will snowball. As to when the planet will become officially uninhabitable—well, it almost certainly will happen in our lifetime, and probably happen much sooner than that. In my opinion—and that’s all it is, opinion—the planet will become unsuitable for unprotected human life within a few tens of years at most, under the most generous possible estimate—and perhaps far sooner than that.”

  “A lot of it depends on what definition of uninhabitable you use,” Vandar said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Officer Chandray. “It seems to me that either a planet is or is not inhabitable.”

  Vandar smiled slightly. “There are definitions for planetary habitability under which Earth herself doesn’t qualify as habitable, because there are places a human could not survive, ah, I think the phrase is, without the aid of technology. You’d drown in the ocean, or freeze to death in the Arctic, or die of thirst in the desert. If you’re willing to use technological means to build a robust enough life-support system, people can live just about anywhere. By that definition, just about any planet with a solid surface could be called inhabitable.”

  “It’s not a time to be cute-or clever,” Chandray said sharply. “We all know what we mean by inhabitable.”

  “Forgive me,” said Vandar. “I wasn’t trying to be clever. My point is that we all think we know what we mean by inhabitable. If—if the worst-case scenario of Admiral Koffield’s model plays out, the current trend of a very slight decrease in the levels of atmospheric oxygen will start to accelerate in the near future. Or maybe the drop won’t speed up for a decade or more. But once the drop does accelerate, within about five years’ time of that event, oxygen levels will be low enough, and carbon dioxide levels will be high enough, that humans will not be able to breathe the open atmosphere without some sort of respirator. Does that make the planet uninhabitable?