The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Koffield had long since finished talking and sat down to watch the seed he had planted as it began to grow. It was a scene that would have been familiar to any near-ancient scientist, and even to the natural philosophers and alchemists and theologians of the middle-ancient or far-ancient periods. They would have recognized the heated discussion, the frantic gesticulations, the formulae and diagrams and doodles being scribbled down and erased and rewritten, and understood what it meant: A new idea had gotten loose, a new way of looking at things that turned the old ways upside down and changed everything.

  That was not to say a near ancient would have understood everything that was going on. Koffield himself was having a great deal of trouble keeping it all straight. Some of the doodling and figuring was happening on the write-boards that lined all the walls, in much the same way it had been done since the day when the first Sumerian drew a sketch in the dirt with a stick. But the way the doodles and calculations tidied themselves up, proofread and corrected themselves, would have given even a late near ancient pause.

  Two or three of the scientists were arguing with their

  Artlnts, while others were shouting at their datapages to get a move on and process the new data. Three-dimensional symbol-logic models popped into being in midair here and there, and then vanished again, or mutated and shifted until the boxes and spheres and log charts bore no resemblance to what had been there at the start.

  More charts and diagrams and visual simulations were appearing out of nowhere. The images of heads, and whole bodies, of scientists popped into being in the middle of the room, and joined in the fray as their originals projected their images from elsewhere on Greenhouse. Display screens came to life and filled with text or images as other scientists linked in.

  Milos Vandar was clearly in his element, but Koffield had no doubt that the other two members of their little traveling group, Ashdin and Sparten, weren’t having much luck making sense of it all.

  Sparten. Koffield looked over at him, on the opposite side of the room, leaning up against the wall, his arms crossed. It was a pose suitable for a prison guard. No one, his posture said, was going to move without his knowing it.

  Sparten worried him. Why was he here? The others he could more or less understand. Obviously Milos Vandar had come to ease the way, to ensure that Koffield got the introduction and the attention he deserved. Wandella Ashdin was a far less logical candidate for the trip, but she had come along anyway. Koffield was willing to guess that Ashdin had talked her way into the group strictly for her own benefit, so that she could pepper him with endless questions about the great man, Oskar DeSilvo. He had done his best to avoid her during the trip, but she had taken every chance she had to learn more about her idol.

  But Sparten. Koffield had no doubt that part of Sparten’s brief was to keep an eye on one Anton Koffield— but who had ordered Sparten to do so, and why he had been so ordered?

  If they—whoever they were—had to choose a watcher, the fact that they had chosen Sparten was informative in and of itself. It suggested that they wanted to keep things close in, tell as few people as little as possible. Sparten already knew a good deal about Koffield and Chandray and the Dotn Pedro IV. Using him saved having to tell someone else—and also got Sparten and his knowledge well away from Solace.

  They were all well away from Solace. Aside from Neshobe Kalzant, Raenau, Parrige, and his assistant Fribart, and probably a few other government officials, everyone who knew about Baskaw’s work had been packed neatly aboard the Cruzeiro do Sul and sent well away from Solace. And the government controlled virtually all communications between Greenhouse and Solace.

  That right there was probably the core reason for picking Koffield’s entourage. Kalzant had said very clearly she needed to control the information until she had time to educate the public. Nor was there necessarily anything sinister about it. But still, Koffield told himself, it would do no harm at all for him to keep his eyes open.

  Whatever one wished to call the gathering—conversation, symposium, heated argument, debate, near riot—it was getting more intense almost moment by moment, and more people were joining in by more and different means. Four separate 3-D cams lowered themselves on extensor arms from the ceiling, extended their twin cameras, and did their best to record and transmit the chaotic scene in three dimensions to remote sites, but Koffield couldn’t see how any set of cameras, whether operated by humans or Art-Ints, could possibly make sense of the uproar.

  And, come to think of it, neither could he. Koffield leaned over to Norla Chandray and smiled at her, feeling at least a whisper of his old sense of humor, lost for too many years, coming back to him. “Well,” he said to her, “I’m completely out of my depth. I haven’t understood a word in the last half hour. I’d say my work here is done. Let’s get out of here.” He got up out of his chair and slipped out the side door into the hallway.

  No one noticed their departure but Yuri Sparten. Sparten was leaning up against the far wall of the room, and made a move as if to follow, but Koffield caught his eye and shook his head no. After a moment’s hesitation, Sparten shrugged and slouched back against the wall. After all, they were in a domed settlement on an uninhabitable satellite. How far could they get?

  Norla followed Koffield out of the room. She had to hurry a bit to catch up with him, but she got up alongside him before he reached the door to the outside of the building and followed him through as he shoved it open.

  “Ah, sir, we shouldn’t just leave like this. You shouldn’t.”

  Koffield smiled. “Why not?”

  “Well—because they need you.”

  “Not anymore, they don’t,” he said, and was surprised by how pleased that made him feel. “I’ve done my part. You can go back if you like. I meant ‘let’s get out of here’ as an invitation, not an order. But I just thought you might care to join me for a stroll.”

  “Sir?” Norla looked at him in surprise. “What do you mean, they don’t need you? We just got down here. You barely spoke ten minutes.”

  “Which was probably eight minutes too long. I wasn’t getting much out of listening to the other speakers. I could barely understand a word any of them were saying.”

  “But it’s all based on your work,” she protested.

  “Which I got from Baskaw,” Koffield said, looking about the dome’s interior with interest. There was a mixed stand of what looked like oak and pine trees a little ways off from the research center. The trees were at least ten meters tall, and clearly taking advantage of Greenhouse’s low gravity to get in some extra growth.

  Koffield decided he wanted a closer look and started walking toward them at a leisurely pace. He had meant it half as a joke, but his work was done, at least for the moment. It was a genuine pleasure to take a little time and admire the trees and the plant life. No question but that they knew how to make them grow, here on Greenhouse.

  “Don’t forget that what they’re calling my work is all Baskaw’s work,” he said to Norla. “I could follow the basics of what she said on the first try, but it took me endless study to get to where I was really confident and comfortable with her arguments and methodology. And her work was from centuries in my past, while these people are from a century in my future. They’ve had all that time to refine and improve terraforming techniques. Unusual sort of dome, don’t you think? Usually they’re all city with a bit of parkland, or all park with one or two maintenance structures. This one is half-and-half.”

  “If they’re all that smart, how is it they never saw what Baskaw saw?” Norla demanded.

  “Point taken. True, they missed what Baskaw found, but then so has everyone else in history. She is the only one ever to find those relationships and formulae and transformations. Her work is original and unique. DeSilvo found her work in the archives, and then I found it because he hid it. That’s really all there is to my contribution. It took a genius unique in all of history to create the work, and I’m no genius. So why blame the scientists here f
or being like everyone else?”

  “Even so, you should go back. They’ll need you. They’ll come looking for you.”

  “Oh, perhaps they’ll look for me just to be polite, but they certainly don’t need me. Not anymore. I’m just the gatekeeper, the man who found the key to a door that’s been locked so long no one even knew it was there anymore. Then I came along and unlocked the door. Once the door’s open, who needs the gatekeeper? The best I can do is get out of the way before they trample me in the rush to get through it.”

  Norla did not answer, and the two of them walked along in silence for a time. It was getting on toward evening as they reached the stand of trees. Koffield paused for a moment to look up, through the transparent dome, at one of the strangest skies he had ever seen.

  The huge bulk of Comfort loomed directly overhead, right where it always was. Just as Earth’s Moon always presented the same face to Earth, so too was Greenhouse tidally locked on Comfort. Comfort was in waning half phase at the moment, the darkened half of its surface blotting out a massive swatch of sky. The SunSpot was just setting in the west.

  In the back of Koffield’s subconscious, old instincts wanted a setting sun to redden and grow dimmer as it approached the horizon. The presence of trees, of sweet air, of grass under his feet, made the expectation all the stronger. But outside the dome was nothing but the near vacuum that passed for an atmosphere on Greenhouse, and the light of the SunSpot was scarcely dimmed at all by its passage through such insubstantial stuff.

  The stars were lost in the SunSpot’s glare, but if one turned around and looked in the opposite direction from the orbiting light source, stars, and even other satellites of Comfort, were plainly visible in an all but perfectly black sky. Stranger still, Lodestar, the true sun of this system, happened to be rising in the east just as the SunSpot set. Though the true sun was bright enough to cast a dim shadow, the SunSpot shone far brighter in the sky of Greenhouse.

  And yet the SunSpot did not shed any noticeable light on Comfort. SunSpot was orbiting Greenhouse, while Greenhouse was orbiting Comfort. As seen from Greenhouse, the planet was behind the orbiting artificial sun at the moment. Besides, the SunSpot’s focusing shield-shell directed virtually all of the SunSpot’s light and heat on Greenhouse. SunSpot was quite literally a spotlight, aimed directly at the small world it circled.

  The oddity of it all was if anything enhanced by the fact that the strange sky hung over a homey, comfortable, utterly familiar parklike setting. There were trees overhead, and a bed of pine needles and dried leaves and gently decaying humus underfoot. What looked and sounded suspiciously like a particularly arrogant male blue jay perched in a tree just ahead, scolding them loudly, and taking obvious pleasure in his own performance. A grey squirrel scuttled around the trunk of an adjacent tree, and the jay turned the brunt of his invective away from the humans and directed it at the new arrival with every bit as much zest and gusto.

  The squirrel climbed his tree to a limb higher than the jay’s level, then swarmed out the limb and leapt straight at the tree, and the limb, and the branch, that held the jay. The jay squawked in outrage, jumped off the branch to avoid the squirrel, and flew away, doing more gliding and less flapping than he would have on Earth, thanks to the lower gravity. The squirrel sat up on its haunches and started cleaning itself with a nonchalance so studied it was hard to believe it was not feigned. The squirrel had won, and the squirrel knew it.

  Anton Koffield smiled, and even chuckled to himself, as he watched. He was quite astonished by how good he felt, how relaxed, even, strange to say, how happy he was. It had been so long since he had felt himself at ease, with no duty, no responsibility, no mission pushing him forward in directions he would not choose for himself.

  Not since the moment, centuries before, back aboard the Upholder, when Alaxi Sayad had detected the intruder assault on the Standfast, on the downtime end of the Circum Central wormhole, had he truly felt himself this free of claims upon himself. Since then he had twice been marooned in the future, twice lost all connection to the people and events of his world, but always the weight of duty had pressed down upon him.

  Even in the days after the Upholder’s return from Circum Central and before he met DeSilvo, when he had had little more to do than fill a desk in the Patrol’s Grand Library offices, he had felt, not that he did not have a duty, but simply that he had no way to carry it out.

  He, Koffield, had put on his own shoulders, and no one else’s, responsibility for the destruction caused by the fight against the Intruders. He knew in his heart that it had been interference with timeshaft-wormhole travel that had caused that disaster. The Intruders’ attacks on the future and the past had produced the chaos. He knew, he understood, even if no one else did, that it was the Intruders who had set it all in motion. But if all that death and loss were to have meaning, then the principles they had died for—defending causality, protecting the future from the past—would have to have value. And there was value, enormous value, in those things. But it was hard to devote one’s life to a theory, an idea, that was by its very nature a negative, an absence. No paradoxes. A past not interfered with. He had found he needed something more, something nonabstract, something real to work with, rather than merely something theoretical to prevent.

  It had been, in large part, Glister that had planted a new duty in his heart. If not for Glister, and his connection to it, he would not have taken up the study of terraform-ing and its failures, certainly not with anything like the sort of zeal he had felt. It was, no doubt, his guilt over Glister that had driven him so hard, made him so determined to prevent a similar collapse at Solace.

  But now. Now he had handed off his information to the people best qualified to use it. He had gotten past all the barriers, all the twists of fate and runs of bad luck and acts of downright sabotage, gatekeepers of another sort, that had tried to block the way.

  Now he had done his job, and everyone else could do theirs. It had taken him a while, but he had come to realize -that the data stolen from him meant nothing. He did not need the books and datasets that had been replaced by a suitcase weighted down with trash. No one did. The scientists and engineers on Greenhouse were experts in the field of terraforming, with resources, experience, and personnel Koffield did not have. They would be able to redevelop all of Koffield’s work, and, more than likely, go beyond it, in a few days or weeks at most.

  The blue jay suddenly swooped back into view and buzzed the squirrel, flying in close and fast enough that the squirrel jumped clean off its branch and barely managed to scramble to safety on a neighboring bough.

  There was something wonderfully comforting and familiar in the sight of the bird and the squirrel teasing and chasing each other. The same scene had, no doubt, been played out a thousand, a million, a billion times in the past, on Earth.

  Familiar. It was that, and no doubt. And, he realized, familiarity was something that had been bothering him, at the back of his mind, for quite a while now.

  He had to laugh at himself. Three minutes ago, he had been congratulating himself on having no more concerns, no more worries, his tasks at an end. It hadn’t taken him long to find something new to worry about.

  But still, it was a mystery. He had been marooned in the future twice, once for nearly eighty years, and once for over a hundred. And yet, more than two centuries outside his own time, far too much was familiar, understandable, and easy. Or maybe he was seeing too much in too little.

  “Officer Chandray?” he began.

  “Yes, Admiral Koffield?” she replied, a smile on her lips.

  There was just enough of a playful, half-sarcastic tone to her voice to make the message loud and clear. Here they were off duty, mission accomplished, walking in a garden, and he was calling her Officer. It was absurd. They had been through a fair amount together, and might end up going through a lot more. And, after all, the word familiarity had more than one meaning. “Message received,” he said. “First names in private, rank and
formal address in public?”

  “Sounds like a fair deal—Admiral. But you go first.”

  “Very well—Norla.” Koffield paused for a moment, surprised at himself. How long had it been since he had been on a first-name basis with—with anyone? How long since he had had anyone he could truly call, not a colleague, or a friendly professional acquaintance, but a friend? Even with two centuries of time-stranding figured into it, it had been a frighteningly long time. But his mind was wandering. “I wanted to ask you something. You’re here from a hundred and twenty-seven years in the past. Doesn’t all this”—he gestured to indicate not just the domed forest, but all of Greenhouse, all of the Solacian system—”seem just a little too much like home?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “I spent a little over a year in that time, in your time,” Koffield said. “It never really occurred to me to realize just how little the time shift threw me off. Now I’ve made a second jump, twice as far as the first, and still I can recognize and understand the world around me. That just doesn’t seem right.”

  “Why should you expect things to change?” asked Norla.

  Koffield shook his head. “You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t expect it. But there have been periods in history where two hundred years of history would leave society changed beyond recognition.”“And there have been times when the basic technology, and society, have remained mostly static for a long time.”

  Koffield nodded thoughtfully. “The theory is—or at least used to be, two hundred years ago, when I did my studies— that advanced, or rather advancing, technology, would force change, accelerate it. The more technology improves, the faster things change, the more technology improves. A positive feedback.”

  “But their technology isn’t that much more advanced than ours,” Norla pointed out. “It’s got refinements, it’s been improved, but it’s essentially the same as what I grew up with.”