The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  The tech worked his way through the remaining steps of the checklist, then nodded in reluctant satisfaction. “The suits are all working fine,” he said. “They can handle the temperatures and pressures you’ll be going into—but don’t push them too far. If you start to get too warm in the suits, don’t just crank up the cooling. You might need that cooling capacity later on, and if you use it up the first time you break into a light sweat, it won’t be there.

  “Remember, once you go into Founder’s, you can’t come back out, no matter what, until they blow the dome. You can’t break the integrity of your suit for any reason until the dome has been blown and you’re out, clear, and have gone through suit decontamination. If you break your leg, or have a heart attack, or vomit your lunch onto the faceplate of your suit, or your suit plumbing fails and you’re peeing into the suit leg instead of the collection system, that’ll just be too bad. You can change your mind anytime up until you enter Founder’s, but once you’re inside, you are in that dome—and in that suit—until the dome is blown. No one’s going to bend the safety regs, or abort something as complicated and dangerous and important as blowing a dome because someone who “asked to go in and signed all the danger waivers calls for help. Is that clear?”

  “Maybe a little clearer than we wanted it,” said Norla.

  “Good,” said the suit tech. “Last chance to bail out. Any takers?”

  Norla glanced at Ashdin, half-expecting her to change her mind about the whole thing. But Ashdin shook her head, and it was clear that Koffield was going to go, no matter what. Norla was almost tempted to wave off. She had experience in long-duration suited missions, and knew how rough they could be. But she was at least as curious as anyone else to find out what Koffield was after.

  Silence gave the suit tech his answer.

  “Hmmph,” he grunted. “I was hoping at least someone would be sensible. All right then. Good luck, and we’ll have the showers ready for you in a bit over two days. Off you go.”

  The tech left the chamber, and the inner door of the airlock swung shut behind him.

  The lock began to cycle. Norla looked up to watch the force-filter field establish itself, masking the top of the chamber, and then begin its descent from the ceiling of the lock: The shimmering grey field moved downward, forcing the air out of the lock, through the floor vents below their feet. Norla could feel its static charge on her skin, even through the pressure suit.

  The field sank lower, over her helmet, flowing down around her suited body. The comm channel filled with scratching and hissing for a moment as the field touched the top of her radio antenna. The radio static grew louder, then faded, to be replaced by silence. No, not silence— exterior silence. There were noises aplenty from inside her suit—the humming and clicking of the machinery, the sound of her own breathing—but there was no longer any sound coming from the outside.

  She looked about herself, and at Koffield’s and Ashdin’s suited figures. Everything had taken on that extra-razor-sharp clarity produced by near vacuum.

  Her pressure suit stiffened a bit as its flexible joints expanded against the near-zero pressure outside the suit. She looked down, watching the filter field drop toward the floor, forcing the air in the lock ahead of it. The grey field vanished, and then, after a brief pause, the outer lock swung open. The surface of Greenhouse lay before them, looking not the least bit green.

  “Let’s get going,” Koffield said, his voice coming now, not from his direction, but from the speakers in Norla’s helmet. He grabbed hold of the equipment carrier’s pull bar and stepped out of the lock, pulling the two-wheeled cart behind him. Norla and Dr. Ashdin stepped out of the lock behind him.

  Koffield stopped and turned back toward the others just a few meters outside the lock. “I want to move fast, but we’ll probably make better time if we take a minute and acclimate first. Get used to the suits, get your bearings, get an idea of what the landscape and the footing are like.”

  Norla took a few cautious steps out onto the rocky, dusty ground. Somehow, being in a heavy pressure suit, out on the surface, made her more aware, rather than less, of Greenhouse’s low gravity. Greenhouse was a small, dark lump of rock. Even with the outgassing caused by human activity, and the heating effects of the SunSpot, its atmosphere was far thinner than Mars’s before the disastrous attempts to terraform that world. The air pressure at the surface of Greenhouse was only slightly thicker than the barely-there-at-all almost-perfect near vacuum on Earth’s Moon.

  The sky was black, the landscape a dirty, dusty grey, the big and small rocks and thick powdery soil all the same gloomy shade. This part of Greenhouse, at least, was not much at all to look at.

  Research Dome rose behind them, and three other active domes loomed at various points on the nearby horizon. Seen from the outside, they glowed with the achingly lovely pure sky-blue of a perfect spring day, a color made only more intense by virtue of being the only color to speak of in the landscape.

  It was just after local sunrise—or, more accurately, local SunSpot rise. Norla’s helmet optics blocked out the image of the SunSpot itself when she turned to look at it. Comfort hung huge and aloof high in the sky, and the stars sprinkled the darkness beyond.

  “All right,” said Koffield, “let’s get moving.” He took up the pull bar of the equipment cart again and started heading east, toward the rising SunSpot. His shadow stretched far behind him as he leaned into the pull bar to get the cart moving over the loose sand that covered the surface.

  “We’re on the private channel now, right?” Ashdin asked.

  “Yes, but I suspect we’re all transmitting at the high-power setting,” said Koffield. “I doubt anyone who took the job seriously would have much trouble listening in if they wanted to do so. I take it you want to talk privately, just among the three of us?”

  “Yes, I do,” Ashdin replied. “We’re going to know more as soon as we get where we’re going. We might as well know it now.”

  “I was expecting you to point that out,” said Koffield. “Very well. Set channel one to minimum range.”

  Norla adjusted her settings. “Chan one, min power,” she announced.

  Koffield paused for a moment to adjust his own gear, but did not look back. “All right,” he said, his voice suddenly made almost tinny by the power drop. “Channel one to minimum power.”

  “I’m, ah, having a little trouble,” Ashdin said.

  “Hold on, I’ll give you a hand,” Norla said.

  “What? Did you say something?”

  Norla resisted the temptation to let out a weary sigh. At least Ashdin didn’t take more than a moment or so to figure out that Norla could hear her, but Ashdin could no longer hear her. She turned toward Norla, and Norla gestured for her to come over to her. She took Ashdin by the forearm, swung it around until she could see it properly. Sure enough, Ashdin had managed to zero out her receiver volume, rather than reduce transmitter power. Norla made the proper adjustments.

  “Can you hear me now?” Norla asked as she peered through Ashdin’s helmet.

  “Oh! Yes!” said Ashdin. “Much better. And now, perhaps, Admiral Koffield, we are private enough for you to tell us what all this is about.”

  But there was no answer from Koffield. Norla turned around and looked in the direction they were heading. Koffield was already several hundred meters ahead. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to have to do some catching up. They deliberately set the minimum range on these suit radios very low, so they won’t interfere with other communications. I think we’re already out of range of his suit. Let’s hurry.”

  Koffield was walking hard, setting an impressively brisk pace, in spite of the fact that he was towing the equipment cart. It took several minutes for Norla and Ashdin to catch up with him.

  “There you are,” Koffield said, when they finally drew abreast of him.

  “Yes, we are,” said Norla, a little out of breath and just a trifle irritated. “You might have waited up for us.”
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  “Forgive me,” said Koffield. “I suppose I’m just eager.” He slackened his pace just a trifle. “I suppose it can’t make any difference if we get there ten minutes later.”

  “Eager for what?” Ashdin demanded, puffing a bit. “It is high time and beyond that you told us what, exactly, we are going to see.”

  Koffield chuckled. “I’m not sure if the joke is on you, or on me, but the honest answer is that I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Ashdin stopped dead and looked straight at Koffield. “You don’t know? Then what in the name of stars and space are we doing out here?” she asked.

  Koffield paused just long enough to look her in the eye, but it was plain that he did not wish to stop a moment longer than he had to. “I have no idea of the what,” he said. “But I have a very strong idea of the why. But please. I am—or at least I have the sense that I am—near the end of a very long chase. A chase I did not even realize I was making, until very recently. I have been held back too long—centuries too long. I will answer all your questions and tell you all I know—but let us keep moving. I am too near the end for stopping long.”

  “All right,” said Ashdin.

  “Thank you,” said Koffield, and immediately set out again, towing the cart behind him.

  “You said you thought you knew the why,” Norla said, addressing the back of Koffield’s suited head. “What did you mean by that? What is the ‘why’ in all this?”

  “Ego,” said Koffield. “The ‘why’ is just one thing: Dr. Oskar DeSilvo’s huge and insatiable ego.”

  Even after all her experience in pressure-suit work, it was strange for Norla to see the man up ahead, and yet hear his disembodied voice come from just by her ear. Perhaps it was because this was not the usual sort of conversation one heard in a pressure suit. This was no routine back-and-forth chitchat about adjusting a docking probe or recalibrating an out-of-whack antenna. This was Anton Koffield, that most private of men, rushing away from them, rushing toward the horizon, and yet revealing himself, explaining himself as he moved toward whatever it was that he sought.

  “Dr. DeSilvo’s ego?” Ashdin repeated. “I know perfectly well that you don’t care for the man, Admiral—but I don’t know why I needed to come out here in order to listen to yet more attacks on him. The man is dead. Does his ego matter now?”

  “Yes,” said Koffield. “Because he’s dead once again, for what seems the thousandth time. He’s cremated and interred. But interred where?” “In Founder’s Dome,” Ashdin said. “Honestly, Admiral. I expected more than a childish question and answer from you.”

  “But consider the man,” Koffield said as he strode along ahead of them. “Think about it. Think, not about what you have known all your life, that he died and left instructions in his will to be cremated and to have the ashes returned to Greenhouse. Think of the man, his pride, his need to be admired, to be at the center of things. Greenhouse? It’s the back of beyond. Solace was the center of his triumph. Think of the oversize, overblown designs and impractical structures he built. All of them meant more to be wondered at than useful. All of them, in a very real sense, are monuments to himself. DeSilvo craved immortality, literal and figurative. Everything he ever did was a bid to be remembered forever.

  “Would he really build himself a modest tomb holding a pathetic little urn full of ashes, and plant it on a world that even he knew couldn’t last forever? Greenhouse will die and go cold and dark forever, once the SunSpot finally fails, and DeSilvo knew that.

  “Wouldn’t it have been more in character to build himself a vast memorial in the center of Solace City, or on some hillside by the town, where everyone who came to see his tomb would have to admire his brilliant architecture as well?”

  Ashdin was silent. Norla glanced over at her, but their faceplates had mirrored themselves against the light of the rising SunSpot, and Norla could not see her face, let alone read her expression. But Koffield’s logic held. It made sense. Something else occurred to Norla.

  “Ulan Baskaw,” she said.

  Koffield stopped for a moment, turned and looked behind himself, his mirrored helmet revealing nothing of his expression. The two women paused as well. He nodded, exaggerating the move to make it noticeable under his suit. “Yes, yes. You’re right, Norla. I hadn’t even thought of that aspect. I’ve been so tied up thinking about why DeSilvo would have insisted on being buried someplace else, I forgot the one reason he would have flatly refused to be buried on Greenhouse.”

  Koffield turned back and started moving again.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ashdin.

  “Think about it,” Norla said as they started to follow Koffield once again. “Think not just about what you knew before we got here, but about what the admiral told you about the Greenhouse-and-SunSpot technique—it wasn’t DeSilvo’s idea. He had to pretend to the whole of Settled Space that he had thought of it himself. But he knew, deep down inside, that he had stolen the idea, plagiarized it from a woman dead hundreds of years before. Solace was his. That he built in his own image. He knew it, and everyone else knew it—and it was true. But Greenhouse? Would he really want to be interred and memorialized on the one world that had to stand for all his lies and self-deceptions? Greenhouse was the world that reminded him he was a fraud.”

  “And that is all the reason you have for thinking DeSilvo is not buried here?”

  “That’s all,” Koffield said. “Except for one thing. You assume DeSilvo died and stayed that way thirteen years after I left for Solace. Why?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why’? Every text, every source, every biography, every witness agrees on the day of DeSilvo’s death.”

  “Were you there? Did you see it? He died and cheated death many times before. Can you prove he died then, for good and all? Or even that he is, in fact, dead? If we opened up the urn in his tomb, would you be able to say for certain the ashes in it were his?”

  It was Ashdin’s turn to stop in her tracks, Norla pausing alongside her, but Koffield did not so much as look behind. “You’re not just saying it’s not his tomb?” Ashdin asked. “You’re saying that the man isn’t even dead?”

  Then Koffield did stop and look back. “Why not?” he asked. “I was born over three hundred years ago,” he said quietly. “I have spent more than three-fourths of that time in cryosleep. DeSilvo had already been in and out of cryosleep and temporal confinement dozens of times when I knew him. He had only actually lived about eighty years of biological time by then, though centuries had gone by. I think it is at least possible that he either feigned death—or truly caused himself to be clinically, if temporarily, dead, merely to avoid confronting me before I left for Solace. Sooner or later, yes, he probably did have his final death. But how can we know for sure? When it comes to a man who has died and flirted with death that often, when it comes to a man who could and did manipulate and fake records in highly sophisticated data-storage systems, I will need something more than books that agree that he died before I believe he is dead for all time.”

  Ashdin did not answer, and the three of them started moving again, walking in silence for a time.

  Koffield was the first to speak, though not about the matter at hand. “That should be Sunflower Dome up ahead, just to the left,” he said. “Or at least, what’s left of it.”

  Sunflower was not like Research Dome behind them. Sunflower was no gleaming swell of sky-blue. They had blown Sunflower a long time ago, and it was as dark and as grey and as dead as everything else on the surface. “Are we sure we want to go through there?” Norla asked.

  “No reason not to. It’s directly between Research and Founder’s. It’ll take us at least two hours to walk around it.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t mind taking up two hours of my time to avoid it,” Norla said. But that sort of talk wasn’t going to convince Koffield, and she followed behind without further argument as they bore toward the wreckage of Sunflower.

  It took no great amount of time for them to reach t
he edge of Sunflower’s debris field, the bits of blown-out dome, broken pieces of machinery, twigs, leaves, branches, whole trees torn up by the roots and thrown out onto the airless surface, and, worse by far, dead birds and small animals, their ruined, pathetic bodies mummified and baked down to nothing by the extreme cold and heat of Greenhouse’s surface.

  Norla spotted the twisted corpse of a squirrel lying in the dirt where it had been thrown by the blowout, its fur turned black by the unfiltered fury of the SunSpot’s radiation. She thought of the jay and the squirrel doing merry battle in the trees of Research Dome, and could not bear to think that the wiry, stiffened, lifeless thing was the same sort of being at all. Was that what the future held for Research Dome as well? Was there no way to stop the inevitable collapses?

  Perhaps, somehow, knowing they were inevitable, knowing that all domes and habitats and terraformed worlds were doomed was the first step. What was the term the terraformers had used over and over during that chaotic symposium? Masked causality? No. Cause-pattern masking, that was it. The deep connections between events got hidden behind the random noise of everyday life, so that twenty-three linked and similar events were seen as twenty-three separate and unrelated incidents. Maybe, someday, taking that mask off would lead them to a way to solve the problem. It was a faint sort of hope, but it was all she could find.

  “Orlang told me this one went wrong,” said Ashdin. “The idea of blowing a dome is to sterilize it so you can reuse it. You’re not supposed to destroy the dome completely. But this was one of the first ones they blew, and they miscalculated the charges and set them wrong. Instead of getting some holes in the dome so it would decompress suddenly, they got a complete structural failure. They’ve learned to do it better since.”