The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  It was plain to Neshobe that Koffield was struggling to calm himself. “I did—what I had to do,” he said. “What I was ordered to do. I did what I did to defend against the very thing my garrison—and the whole of the Chronologic Patrol—were established to protect against—a violation of causality. There were people aboard those ships, colonists and their equipment. I had no intention of harming any of those people, and I will regret it to the end of my days. What I did will haunt me to the end of my days. Those people died as a consequence of my actions. If the Glisterns wish to hate me for that, then—then they do no more than I do myself, many a sleepless night.

  “But after the ships were lost, I studied the records of those ships, their manifests, their histories, all I could learn about them. But there was nothing, nothing aboard those ships that was not replaceable, and, as a matter of fact, soon replaced. I killed those crews, and many more died because those ships did not reach Glister—but I did not kill a world. Glister died of the same illness that is killing Solace, and not because a few shiploads of equipment were lost.”

  The room went silent for a time. Even the rain spattering down on the roof faded away, and the people around the table sat, still as stone.

  “That is-true,” Milos Vandar said at last, speaking quietly. “But what is true, and what people believe, are two very different things. I’d go so far as to say, what people know and what they believe are often two different things.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Admiral Koffield,” Neshobe said. “From all I have ever read, and from all I have seen and heard here today, you are a man who did his duty and has suffered the torments of hell ever since as a consequence.”

  “Yes,” Koffield said. “And neither you nor I nor anyone else can do the least thing about it. But—thank you, all the same. I killed Glister? Incredible.”

  Koffield shook his head again. “As regards the matter at hand—I must confess that, in spite of all the endless hours I have spent on this problem, the political angle never crossed my mind. I have lived in the military, where you give or take the orders and the orders are obeyed. But of course you are right. You cannot simply order the planet’s population to do as you say.”

  “I will order them about, and I’ll make my orders stick, if it comes to that,” Neshobe said. “I will do whatever it takes to protect my people, even if I have to protect them against their will. But it will be worse for everyone if it comes to that. I would prefer to persuade them. To do that, I need more and better proof.”

  “It’s a hell of a shame the copies of your final report didn’t get here,” Raenau said to Koffield.

  Neshobe looked at Raenau thoughtfully. Was there perhaps a slight hint of doubt, of accusation, in his voice? If Raenau did not completely trust or believe Koffield’s information, that confirmed all her worries. If a hard-edged, rational, well-informed man like Raenau could not trust in Koffield completely, was there the slightest hope the general populace would?”If you can offer up any sort of plausible story for why I would stage this whole catastrophe, what possible motive I might have for pretending to have proof of an imaginary disaster, why I might go to the incredible lengths that would have been required to fake the proof I have offered, I’d be glad to hear it,” Koffield replied sharply, responding more to Raenau’s tone than his words. “What possible reason would I have for stranding myself one hundred and twenty-seven years away from everyone and everything I know?”

  “Escape,” Raenau said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “You yourself have just finished agreeing with us that your life back there was something close to a hell. You were a villain. Why not send a real-sounding advance message on the Chrononaut VI, put a heap of compressed scrap into a secured container, sabotage your own ship, and arrive a century and a quarter in the future as a hero, a savior, a visionary? It’s obvious that your ship was sabotaged in a very precise way, and obvious that your tamperproof secured container was somehow tampered with—or else the tampering was staged. We have only your word that there was a final report, or that it was ever in that container.”

  “How dare you—” Koffield began, coming half out of his seat.

  “I do not say I believe any of this,” Raenau said in a firm, emphatic voice. “But you asked for a plausible story. I will not be the first, or last to think of it, or of many other variants. You could say the theory I’ve offered is impossible. So it is. But it’s plain that something implausible, something unlikely, has happened. I at least have offered a version of events, an explanation. You have not done so. You asked for a theory of how this could have happened. I have offered one.”

  “If it’s a fraud, it’s one damned hell of a good one,” Vandar said. “I agree one preliminary report isn’t enough basis for deciding the fate of a planet, but this”—he patted the datapage that held his copy of the report—”is solid work. Good math, good science. It’s both self-consistent and consistent with the existing body of work. It’s more than that. It answers nagging questions, ties together loose ends.”

  “Their being stranded in our time could have been staged, even if the report was not,” Raenau said.

  “Maybe that’s true, but so what?” Vandar asked. “We can test the report, check it, take it apart, put it together again. We don’t have to take the admiral’s word for any of it. We can go see for ourselves.”

  “Great,” Raenau said. “You go do that. I’ll want to hear about it. But even Admiral Koffield has got to admit there’s a problem when it tells me a big long story about how he’s moved heaven and Earth to get a report to me— and it just so happens the only copy of the report we can get at has vanished mysteriously.”

  “It’s not the only copy.”

  Neshobe had not heard the voice for so long that it took her a minute to realize who was speaking. “Officer Chandray? There’s another copy? Surely if you knew that, you should have spoken up before now.”

  “There is,” Chandray said. “There must be.” She turned to Koffield. “You wouldn’t have traveled with the only copy. You would have made sure it was placed in the Grand Library, or the Permanent Physical Collection, or hidden with some trusted friend or another. Something. You probably did all of those things, and more.”

  “I did,” Koffield said. “But, assuming those copies even survived this long, they are light-years from here, back in the Solar System. What good do they do us here?”

  “None, unless someone goes to get them,” said Chandray. She turned to Neshobe. “You could send word back on the next timeshaft ship to Earth, and have a search performed.”

  “I could, and I will,” said Neshobe. “But there are no timeshaft ships in-system—aside from the one you came in on.”

  “When’s the next ship expected?” Chandray asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s something else that’s changed from your day,” said Parrige. “Timeshaft ships rarely call at Solace anymore. Trade has dried up.”

  “That’s a polite way of saying we don’t have anything they want, and we can’t afford much of what they have,” Raenau growled.”True enough,” Neshobe agreed. “But in any event, there’s no way we can get a message back to the Grand Library, or anyone else, just at the moment. There’s no ship to send it on.”

  “Except the Dom Pedro IV,” said Chandray.

  Aha, thought Neshobe. There it is at last. She had spent too many years in politics to be surprised by a show of self-interest masquerading as some sort of generous offer. It was a relief finally to have it show up. These two characters had seemed too good to be true. Neshobe had not the slightest doubt that Chandray had known ahead of time that there were no other ships in-system or expected. “You’re suggesting that we might use your ship?” Neshobe asked sweetly.

  “It at least seems a reasonable enough notion that it ought to be considered,” Chandray said, offering an answer hedged in with qualifiers.

  “According to what I’ve heard from you, that ship of yours is not in the best of shape,” Raenau objected. “And
it is a hundred years or so out-of-date.”

  “But it’s what you’ve got,” Chandray said, a bit too eagerly. She would never get far as a negotiator. “We need to get our ship checked over, and maybe repaired. And you need a ship.”

  “You’ve suggested a reason we might need a ship,” Neshobe said.

  “Officer Chandray’s ship was crippled while attempting to bring vital information to this world,” Koffield said. “None of her crew can ever return to their homes or their families. Two crew members died in cryosleep, apparently as an indirect result of the sabotage committed against the ship. Officer Chandray nearly died herself, and is only recently recovered. Precisely because the ship is an antique, it seems highly unlikely that there are any available qualified crew in this system, a fact which she knows perfectly well. If the Dom Pedro IV flies again, Officer Chandray will have to cross the starlanes on the ship that stranded her in your time, killed two of her friends, and almost killed her. She has no ownership stake in the ship, and won’t gain anything from the repairs. Nor is the ship hers to command. Only Captain Marquez can make such decisions. Under those circumstances, suggesting that the ship be sent off after a misplaced book hardly seems like the height of selfishness.

  “Unless you people wish to accuse Officer Chandray or me of any other frauds, crimes, shady deals, or dishonest acts, I suggest we take her suggestion at face value.” Koffield glared around the table. “This isn’t our planet; If you wish to take everything we say or do as a trick, feel free to do so. It will make no particular difference to us.”

  Neshobe spoke up before anyone else could, mostly to keep anyone else from speaking and making things worse. “Very well, Admiral. Point taken.” The tension in the room was getting out of hand. There was going to be a fistfight in another few minutes—but she was not at all sure who would be fighting whom. She had to defuse this, and fast.

  At that moment, the solution came to her. A way to buy time and get something useful accomplished, all at once. “It seems to me that your ship needs refitting, and we need to do a great deal more research into the whole question of ecologic collapse. There’s a place where we can get both those things done. Officer Chandray, if you would be so kind as to contact your Captain Marquez, please invite him to bring his ship into Shadow-Spine Station. We will provide whatever service and repair the Dom Pedro IV needs at no charge. I would suggest you take your lighter, the Cruzeiro do Sul, and meet him there. It’s quite convenient to your own destination. And perhaps Vandar, and a couple of others, could accompany you.”

  “To Shadow-Spine?” Vandar asked, and then smiled. “Ah, yes. That makes a great deal of sense.”

  Chandray looked from Neshobe to Vandar, clearly puzzled. “Ah, well, very good, ma’am. That’s an extremely generous offer, and one that I’ll relay to Captain Marquez as soon as possible. But, ah, well . . . Could you tell me where Shadow-Spine Station is? What’s our destination?”

  “Shadow-Spine Station in on the spine between Ballast and SunSpot, orbiting Greenhouse,” Vandar said.

  “I’m sorry?” Chandray said.”Greenhouse,” Vandar said. “Executive Kalzant is absolutely right. It’s the center of terraforming and climate research for the whole Solacian system, and Shadow-Spine is our most advanced shipyard.

  “Greenhouse,” he said. “That’s where you need to be.”

  SUNSROX AND GREENHOUSE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Gatekeepers

  “There he is on visual,” said Phelby, pointing unnecessarily at the blinking dot that was moving slowly toward them.

  “I see him, Mr. Phelby,” said Captain Marquez. He watched the incoming flashing light grow larger, brighter, evolving into a constantly visible dot that flared brighter every two seconds, to a spacecraft with discernible features, and an acquisition strobe flashing beside the main docking port. Marquez had never much enjoyed being the passive target in a rendezvous and docking operation, and he liked it even less under the present circumstances. They were not in a comfortable sort of neighborhood.

  Beyond the approaching tug lay the weird dumbbell shape of the SunSpot Construct. The SunSpot itself was the end of the dumbbell pointed straight at the satellite Greenhouse, while Ballast was at the spaceside end, with the Shadow-Spine forming the link between them. Greenhouse itself loomed behind the Construct, with the massive banded gas giant planet Comfort in turn swallowing half of the sky behind Greenhouse. A strange and disturbing vista of increasingly huge and foreboding shapes floating in the darkness.

  As seen from this vantage point, the SunSpot itself was a gleaming silver sphere, five kilometers across, the Shadow-Spine rising up out of its perfect surface. The Spine itself was an arrow-straight shaft twenty kilometers long, with any number of complex extrusions and shapes and radiators and structures sprouting from it in all directions. Ballast sat at the far end of the Spine, a misshapen lump of sky-rock that served no other purpose than to provide sufficient deadweight to move the center of gravity for the whole structure out of the SunSpot and down to the center point of the Spine’s length. Massive main trim and aiming thrusters were mounted on the rocky surface of Ballast.

  But the SunSpot itself was very clearly the business end of SunSpot Construct. Marquez could tell that much by looking past the SunSpot, down to the surface of Greenhouse. The hemisphere directly under the SunSpot was brilliantly illuminated, and the illumination was very definitely not coming from the local sun.

  From this vantage point, safely behind the shield-wall of SunSpot’s outer shell, the shell appeared perfectly round. But Marquez knew that was not the case: The face of the shell nearest Greenhouse was sliced away, exposing the interior.

  There, inside the truncated sphere that was the outer shell of the SunSpot, an artificial miniature sun shone down on the surface of Greenhouse below. The inner surface of the shell was coated with superreflectant material, and formed into a massive adjustable focusing mirror that directed virtually all the light down onto Greenhouse, rather than letting it radiate wastefully off into space.

  The rest of SunSpot Construct was there to control, service, and maintain the SunSpot itself. Shadow-Spine’s primary function was to serve as a radiator farm to dump waste heat energy from SunSpot. But one system’s wasted heat was another system’s free energy source. Only a fraction of a percent of SunSpot’s power output went down the Spine, but that was enough to provide a large facility with effectively free and unlimited energy. Shadow-Spine Station had been built so as to take advantage of that power source.

  It seemed to Marquez that literally living on the heat-dump spine for the largest artificial fusion reactor ever built was crossing well over the line into insanity, but free energy was one devil of a strong draw.

  And part of that free energy went into running a shipyard. And the shipyard had sent out a tug to greet them and fit. the Dom Pedro IV with an updated midship docking collar. That way the DP-IV could cozy up to Shadow-Spine Station and dock with the station herself. It was not a situation that made Marquez happy.

  But at least it would mean he would get his lighter back. The Cruzeiro do Sul was already docked at Shadow-Spine, empty and waiting for him. Koffield, Chandray, and their party had already shuttled down to the surface of Greenhouse.

  The only practical way of getting the Cruzeiro do Sul back was to dock at Shadow-Spine, but Marquez knew he would have probably agreed to dock at Shadow-Spine, despite all his misgivings, even if the Cruzeiro do Sul had not been there. A free comprehensive diagnostic exam and refit was every bit as strong a draw as a free power source. When PlanEx Kalzant had made that offer, she had revealed herself as someone who knew what motivated a ship’s captain. The offer had been impossible to resist— but, on the other hand, Marquez could not help but wonder what Kalzant’s motivation had been. Generosity was all very nice, but what was in it for her?

  Or, to put it another way, to what use did Neshobe Kalzant want to put his ship?

  The devil with it. He would find out soon enough, and worr
ying about it would not make that time come any sooner.

  “I’ll be in my quarters,” Marquez told Phelby. “Advise me when the tug has docked.”

  Milos Vandar scribbled furiously on the board behind him, a perfect forest of incomprehensible symbols trailing behind his scriber. “And that third function can be further reduced this way”—he struck out half the symbols he had just written—”and, as you can see, that establishes equivalence with the sixth condition of formula six over there”— he jabbed his scriber toward another writeboard on the opposite wall—”which should serve as ample proof of Baskaw’s secondary population interference theorem.” He set the scriber down on the table in front of him and folded his arms triumphantly.

  The room was dead silent for five full seconds as the other scientists worked through the proof, and then the uproar started anew as they shouted their questions, their protests, their agreement, at Vandar.

  Anton Koffield watched thoughtfully from a chair on the side of the room. He had been on Greenhouse less than a day, but that day had been decidedly fruitful. Vandar had brought Koffield and Chandray straight from the landing field to the Terraformation Research Center.

  The symposium, if one could call it that, consisted of experts Vandar had pulled in from every terraforming discipline. Vandar had simply stood Koffield up by the write-board at one end of a medium-sized lab-lecture room, and told everyone to sit down and listen to what Koffield had to say.