The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “They’ve had a lot of practice,” Koffield said grimly. “This whole world is nothing but domed settlements and farms and experimental plots.”

  The debris got bigger, and heavier, as they drew near the perimeter of the dome itself. They walked around a fifteen-meter oak tree lying on its side. The decompression explosion had uprooted it and thrown it clear out of the dome. The ruined tree had leaves still on its branches, and dirt clumped to its roots. To see a once-living thing that massive, out in the hard vacuum, to see death in the landscape of the unliving airlessness, tore at Norla’s heart. All was doom. All was death.

  Picking their way through the debris, they came to the solid anchor wall, still intact, that had once held and supported the clear dome that was not there anymore. Someone had bulldozed the debris away from an airlock door that was the near twin of the one through which they had departed Research Dome. The rubble was shoved up against the anchor wall to each side of the lock.

  Both the inner and outer doors of the lock stood open, and they stepped through, into the wreck of Sunflower Dome.

  Apparently the wreckage of Sunflower was a convenient enough overland shortcut to merit bulldozing paths through the interior ruins as well. There were three paths cleared through the rubble. One led due east, the second bore off to the southeast, and the third went northeast. Koffield had studied every available map before departing, and led them unhesitatingly down the northeasterly path.

  Having the rubble cleared out of their way only made the wreckage to either side seem worse. They walked past ruined fields, buildings with the doors and windows blown out, pieces of clothing, datapages, books, papers, a child’s toy doll—small, personal things, abandoned by their owners, scattered by the decompression explosion, and then left where they had fallen. The wrecked buildings, stands of trees that, somehow, had remained standing after the disaster, loomed up ahead of them as they walked and then receded into the rear.

  The scale of the place made it seem the ruin of a haunted mansion built long ago for a race of giants. It seemed unbelievable that any mere humans could be capable of building so much, of reaching for such great height—or of then letting it fall from so high, into such depths of loss and failure. Overhead, the Sunspot was rising steadily in the east, as the huge, dim, aloof bulk of Comfort remained frozen in one spot in the sky. But if the sky seemed strange and alien, the landscape was more so.

  It was an incomprehensible place. Norla thought of barbarians walking through a once-mighty city, past structures far mightier than they could dream of, surrounded by evidence of a long-vanished power that had far surpassed their own abilities. Could the Solacians of today, the ancestors of the people who had made this place, build anything as grand as this ruin?

  But the operative word was ruin. Today Sunflower Dome was like this. Tomorrow, quite literally, it would be Founder’s turn. And then? This was the doom that awaited the trim, cheerful parks of Research Dome, and everyplace else, save Earth herself, that Norla had ever seen. Koffield had shown them that, shown that every dome and habitat and world would die. Past, present, future.

  The knowledge seemed more curse than anything else. It did not bear thinking about.

  “If it’s not a tomb—if it isn’t—what is it?” Ashdin asked, breaking the long silence that had held since they reached the wreckage of Sunflower’s airlock.

  “I beg your pardon?” Koffield said.

  “The tomb. You’ve told us your reasons for thinking that’s not what it is. So what do you think it is?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Koffield said. But then, after a moment, he corrected himself. “No, that isn’t quite true. I have ideas. But they seem absurd, even to me.”

  “What are they?” she demanded.

  He paused for a minute, set down the cart handle, and flexed his hands, stretching the kinks out of them as he turned around. “Shall we rest for a minute?”

  “Fine with me,” said Norla. They were in the middle of what once might have been an ornamental garden, with large flat boulders, the right height to serve as benches, set here and there. She sat down on one of them, and Ashdin sat next to her. Koffield remained standing, and paced back and forth in front of them. “So,” Norla said. “Tell us. What do you think DeSilvo built instead of a tomb?”

  “And how you reached those conclusions,” put in Ashdin.

  “Very well,” he said. “Start with the maxim Think like your enemy,” he said. “That’s what I always heard from my instructors when I was learning to be-an intelligence officer.”

  “But—” Ashdin cut in.

  “Before you can launch into debate on the point,” said

  Koffield, “no, I don’t believe DeSilvo to be my enemy—at

  .least I don’t know it for certain. But he was, or is, certainly my opponent. I sought to uncover what he sought to hide.

  . He wanted one thing, and I wanted another. Fair enough?”

  “I suppose so,” Ashdin said, not well satisfied.

  “So I need to think like him, understand him, if I am to make sense of what he does.” Koffield stopped pacing and looked directly at Ashdin, his face faintly visible behind the faceplate of his suit. “You still see him as a hero, a genius. I no longer do. Is he, was he, evil, or delusional, or insane? I don’t think so. And yet, somehow, he committed a crime so vast that you, Dr. Ashdin, and I daresay most people, have trouble even seeing it as a crime. The only defense I can see is that, somehow, he did not know the consequences of what he was doing, but I cannot believe that. He must have known. He terraformed Solace with the certain knowledge that the terraformation would collapse and fail. He used a technique to make it happen faster, but he had to know perfectly well that the technique would bring the doom on faster. You have seen the evidence I brought, heard the story I told. What other explanation do you have?”“We only have your word to go on concerning this Ulan Baskaw woman and her books,” Ashdin said. “Her name doesn’t appear in any archive, any history, that I have heard of.”

  “True. I hadn’t considered that point. But there is at least evidence of the existence of Baskaw’s work. I am no mathematician, but I brought your terraformers the work of a mathematical genius. It must have come from somewhere. It dovetails perfectly with the work DeSilvo claims as his own, and it has the merit of being true, and testable. Surely that gives me some credibility. And where you have been able to match my story against your records, it has checked out.”

  “But even so,” Ashdin protested, “I can’t believe it. He wouldn’t do it.”

  Norla spoke up. “Just for the sake of argument, Doctor. You wanted the admiral’s answer. Let him go on.”

  “Very well,” said Ashdin, plainly reluctant. “For the sake of argument, let us say your story is true. But—but my point is that surely you can see that behaving as you said he did would be completely out of character for Oskar DeSilvo.”

  “Yes it would.” Koffield turned away from where the two women sat, and considered the dead and ruined landscape that surrounded them. “It would be out of character—at least for part of him, the part he let be seen. He was kind, gracious, a gentleman—better liked, and more loved, than I will ever be. And yet he was a schemer, a manipulator, a user, a trickster, a plagiarist on the grandest scale. I have no proof—at present—of my stories of Baskaw and vanishing books, but they are nonetheless true. They tell me that Oskar DeSilvo was a whirling mass of contradictions. I am not the least bit ashamed to admit that I find thinking from his perspective, his point of view, difficult in the extreme.”

  “So what would a man like that leave in a tomb?” Norla asked.

  “Tomb. I think part of the answer lies in that word,” said Koffield. “A false tomb. Cryosleep chamber. Temporal-confinement chamber. All of them simulations of death.

  And recall that, once I found Baskaw’s books, he literally retreated into death, albeit temporarily, perhaps merely to avoid dealing with me. Tombs are safe, death is safe. No one can bother yo
u, or challenge you, when you are dead. But he had an ego. A massive one. I don’t think he could imagine that people would be fooled forever by his frauds and failures. And, of course, in some corner of his heart, he knew that Solace was going to fail, to collapse. DeSilvo, for all his flaws, was quite definitely human enough to be capable of feeling guilt—and he certainly had enough to feel guilty about. But death, real or imagined, would let him hide from the wrath of those he had hurt.”

  Koffield turned again, and looked in the direction of their travel, toward Founder’s Dome and whatever was there. “He had to know that both frauds—his tomb, and Solace itself—would fail sooner or later. So why build a false tomb for himself on the wrong world—on the world dedicated to terraforming research?”

  “An answer,” said Norla. “An answer he could leave behind without getting near the people and the worlds he had hurt.”

  “Yes,” Koffield said. “Precisely. Pride, guilt, ego, and death. A man preoccupied with those, a man who had vast resources at his command, who had perhaps decades to study the problem, rather than the mere weeks and months I had, or the mere days that our friends at Research Dome have had—such a man might have found something. A way out.”

  “And hidden it in his tomb?” Ashdin asked.

  “Resurrection!” Norla said, standing up suddenly. “Out of the tomb comes life!”

  “And the resurrection of his own reputation,” Koffield . said, the excitement in his voice barely controlled. “Precisely. It fits. It all fits his psychology far better than sticking his own real tomb on Greenhouse after his own real death.”

  “And you’re worried that whatever that answer is, it might not survive explosive decompression,” said Ashdin.

  “Look around you,” said Koffield, gesturing toward the hideous wreckage that surrounded them. “Suppose they get it this wrong again? Whatever the clue is that we’re looking for, I doubt we’d find it in a place that looked like this.”

  Ashdin stood up as well, and looked from Norla to Koffield. “It’s not enough,” she said. “You might have something, yes. But it’s too thin. Too clever. You’re reaching too far. Maybe DeSilvo’s Tomb is not what we all thought—but I don’t think it’s what you think either.”

  “Shall we go find out?” Koffield asked quietly, calmly.

  “Let me pull the cart for a while,” Norla said. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Collateral Damage

  They moved on without saying much of anything. Maybe they had said too much as it was. They reached the far side of Sunflower Dome’s perimeter and exited through another abandoned airlock with both doors left open. The same sort of debris littered the ground on this side of the dome. It was hard not to reflect on the notion that they were, quite deliberately, heading into a place that was going to have the same thing happen to it. In theory, the dome engineers knew better this time and could do an explosive decompression of Founder’s that would blast the air out without tearing the roof off the place. All they could do was hope that Founder’s Dome would be blown with a bit more care and precision than Sunflower, and that the precautions they had taken to protect themselves when the time came would be enough.

  They spotted a work crew just coming out of the Founder’s Dome west airlock when they were about a kilometer away. They could just barely see one of the figures waving its arms at them.

  “Do you think they’re calling us?” said Ashdin.

  “Switch over to the general comm channel,” Koffield said.

  Norla switched her own comm over, and instantly heard a new voice.

  “—ou the crazies going in there?” the voice asked, more quizzical than rude. It was a man’s voice.

  “That’s us,” Koffield replied, cheerfully enough. “We’ve got all the clearances we need.”

  “Fine,” the voice said. “Glad to see you.” Norla could just barely make out the tiny figures by the base of the dome. Her suit didn’t have image enhancers, and she had to squint a bit to see them at all. A second figure turned to look at them, but the other three, busy packing up their open-frame roller transport, paid them no attention.

  “Is there anyone else still in the dome?” Koffield asked.

  “No, you’ll have it all to yourselves,” the man said. “We set up the last of the heaters and charges using remotes and Artlnts and robots. None of our team have been in the dome itself for a week now. Decontamination drills just got to be too much of a hassle. Maybe your crowd has the right idea. Stay inside until the blast.”

  “The hell they do,” a second voice, a woman’s, replied. “I’m not gonna stand at ground zero for a bake-and-blow.”

  “It shouldn’t be that bad,” the man said. “They put you through a standard blowout drill, brief you on what to do?”

  “Yes,” said Norla. “We spent the last two days on that kind of thing.”

  “Then you’ll be fine. Keep anchored and sheltered, go easy on your suit cooling, and there won’t be a thing to worry about.”

  “Speaking of cooling,” the woman’s voice said, “we’ve already shut down the interior cooling on the dome. It’s middle of local afternoon now. The dome heaters won’t kick in at all until sunset. There might be a minor spike in the temp uptrend then. But when the SunSpot rises tomorrow, you’ll find out why they call it Greenhouse. With the SunSpot and the interior heaters going, the temps are going to climb like crazy, so be ready.”

  “We will.”

  “We’re going to blow the dome just after sunset tomorrow to get the widest temperature gradient possible,” the man’s voice said. “You be ready. This thing is complicated, a whole sequence that started weeks ago. We can’t stop it now if we’re going to blow the dome right.”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure,” the woman agreed. “Sunflower is what happened back when we thought we could just abort a dome-blow and then just start over. Things went wrong. So we’re not doing that again. Clear?”

  “We’re clear,” said Koffield.

  “And we’re out of here,” said the man. This time Norla was sure she could see him wave. He climbed aboard the transport, then helped the woman aboard. “So long,” he said, “and good luck.”

  “Thank you,” said Koffield. “Farewell to you.”

  The transport started up, its rear wheels rooster-tailing a plume of dust up off the ground as the transport started off. It turned toward the southeast, moving quickly across the barren land. It took no more than a few seconds for it to be lost to view behind a low hill.

  They started walking again, on the last leg of the journey.

  The inner door of the lock came open. The three of them stepped into Founder’s Dome—and instantly understood why it had to die. A sealed habitat dome was supposed to be a controlled environment, but there was no part of Founder’s that was even remotely under control.

  The three of them had indeed been briefed before going in, and it was plain to see that none of the briefers’ horror stories had been exaggerated. Founder’s had started out as a crop development center, but had been converted into recreational space decades before. It was supposed to be parkland, but the manicured lawn and carefully tended glades had failed long ago. Uncontrolled organisms of every sort had invaded the dome. Mold and lichen covered virtually every surface. The trees that still survived were spindly, wretched things, barely capable of pushing out leaves. The ponds were covered by thick mats of brownish-green algae.

  Roaches scuttled over everything, and termites were plainly at work in most of the trees, living and dead. But no other animals of any sort survived. The birds had been wiped out by a rogue virus months before. The fish had been simultaneously suffocated and poisoned as the algae sucked all the oxygen out of the water and excreted all manner of toxins, the same waterborne toxins that had done in the small mammals as well. Norla spotted a dead rat that seemed to have dropped in its tracks by the side of one small pond. Mold was growing on the fur of the rotting corpse.

  Even the materia
l of the dome itself had been corrupted. Some sort of slimy mildew had started to form on it. In some places the mildew was merely a thin, translucent layer, but in others it was several centimeters thick— so thick that it had started to buckle and peel off the dome under its own weight.

  As bad as it all looked to the naked eye, the briefers had assured them, it was worse on the microscopic level. The bacteria seemed to be mutating into new and more deadly variants with every passing day. Even the roaches were succumbing to opportunistic infections. The entire dome was nothing but a tangle of disease vectors.

  Koffield, Norla, and Ashdin walked along what had once been a tree-lined path of white crushed stone, and was now a dismal alley, the stone stained black with lichen, the path half-blocked by fallen tree limbs.

  “Thanks be to the founders,” Koffield whispered. “For look what they have bequeathed unto us.”

  “This is dreadful,” Ashdin said. “I knew it was going to be bad, but I had no idea. I was here, years ago, before it started to go bad. It was lovely then. Just lovely.”

  They came to a big ceramic heater that had been set up along one side of the path. It was not powered up yet, but it would be soon. Norla checked her suit’s outside temperature gauge. It was already warm out there without the heaters running, and the heaters were due to kick in at dusk. She glanced up through the mildew-fogged dome to the slightly blurry image of the SunSpot.

  “We don’t have a lot of daylight left,” she said. “If we’re here to get a look at DeSilvo’s Tomb, maybe we should get there while we can still see it.”

  “You’ve been here before, Dr. Ashdin,” said Koffield. “You lead the way.”

  Ashdin chuckled dryly. “Well, the place has changed just a bit since the last time I was here. But I believe if we bear off to the left at the next crossing, that will lead us there.”