The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But if not ashes, then what? There was no way in the world to know. She leaned in harder to force the tip of the handle in deep. There. Yes. “It’s definitely starting to give.”

  “Good,” said Koffield.

  “Why isn’t Wandella back yet?” Norla asked. “Dr. Ashdin, you back in radio range yet?”

  She got an answer back this time, if a bit broken up. “—hear you,—ore or—ess.—idn’t have much luck.”

  Ashdin had been scavenging the area for tools, or anything else that might come in handy. “Well, we’re making progress as it is. I think. You might as well come back.”

  Norla leaned in one more time, and was rewarded with a distinct crack from somewhere under the urn.

  “That sounded good,” Koffield said.

  “Yeah. It’s coming.” Norla was half-sprawled over the sphere. She thought she could feel the warmth of it through her suit. Was that possible? The suit was superbly insulated, after all. Or was she just imagining things? A trickle of sweat ran down her forehead and down to the tip of her nose. It hung there and refused to drip off. She shook her head violently, and it fell. Wherever the heat was coming from, she knew she was overheating. She knew damn well there were few worse things you could do in a pressure suit. For the dozenth time, she resisted the temptation to crank up her cooling. They weren’t even at the bad part yet. She shoved on the cart handle again, and the urn came away from the sphere with a resounding crack.

  “That’s it,” Koffield said, and lifted the bulky object down, and set it on the floor of the tomb. “Whatever it is.”“Do you think there is something in there? Something useful?”

  Koffield shook his head. “The one thing I’ve learned today is that my guesses and opinions aren’t worth much. There could be anything in there, or nothing but ashes.” Koffield knelt to examine the urn more carefully. “It’s big for a funerary urn. Maybe—” Koffield stared at the urn, then shook his head. “Oh, to hell with it. I’m past guessing. For now, let’s get it in a cool-down bag.”

  “I’ll get one from the cart,” Norla said, and walked out of the tomb. The radio link kept them talking in normal tones even as they moved around the tomb. “I wish I were past guessing. My mind is still whirling with it all. Why did he do it all? The cruelty of it all. Sabotaging the ship, destroying your evidence.”

  “To protect his reputation,” Koffield said. “Or maybe he had even talked himself into believing Baskaw was wrong, that the fast techniques weren’t flawed. He could have told himself that if I got to Solace on time I would cause a needless panic that could have wrecked the whole project at a critical time.”

  “But why leave a message for you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She stepped out of the tomb, and looked out into the blood-red night, the last night of all for Founder’s Dome. The massive ceramic heaters dotted around the dome’s interior were hard at work, glowing cherry-red, casting patches of dim, shadowless light. Fires were burning near a half dozen of them, but none seemed likely to get close enough to threaten the tomb. “What was so critical about that moment?” she asked as she knelt by the cart. She found the cool-down bag and headed back toward the tomb’s interior.

  “In a big complicated project, every moment is critical if you’re looking for excuses to do what you want,” said Koffield. “He stopped me causing that panic and did it without killing us all. He probably thought he was being clever and humane.”

  “Humane enough to get two of us killed in cryo,” Norla said. “And none of us will ever see our families again. Our homes are probably unrecognizable, if they’re still there and we can ever get to them. It would almost have been kinder to kill us all outright.” She knelt next to Koffield and handed him the bag. “Which brings us to the next mystery, the next why. The codes on the wall of the tomb,” she went on. “Was that just more cruelty, a nasty trick from beyond the grave? It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just for that.”

  “No. He couldn’t have. The codes were here, for Marquez and for me. Were they a confession, a boast, the punch line to his joke? Some of each, is my guess. But they were more. The lines of numbers and characters pointed right at this urn. There has to be something in it.” Koffield reached out and touched the urn, ran his fingers along its gleaming surface. “There has to be something that will make it all worthwhile.” His voice faded away to a whisper. “Something, something that will at least give it all meaning,” he said, and the words were nearly a prayer.

  The SunSpot rose over Hell.

  The old fires had died, after filling the dome’s air with smoke. New ones were popping up everywhere as the howling winds scattered sparks and burning trash everywhere. But the dome’s supply of oxygen was close to depletion, and nearly every new blaze guttered down to nothing almost as fast as it flared up. «

  The temperature continued to climb, reaching and surpassing one hundred centigrade shortly after sunrise. The filthy, algae-choked water in the once-decorative ponds was beginning to hiss and steam and bubble as it rose over the boiling point.

  The plant life and algae were turning brown, drying up as the heat drove out their reserves of moisture. The last of the insects were dying, on their backs, writhing in agony as they were slowly cooked alive. Aside from Koffield, Norla, and Wandella Ashdin there would shortly be no creature larger than a cockroach still alive out there.

  The dome’s air pressure had already increased by a full five percent. The dome air had expanded as it heated, and smoke and steam were adding to the actual mass of gases in the air. The situation had reached the runaway-greenhouse stage. The thicker the air, and the more burn products in it, the better an insulator and heat absorber the dome became. Even if the heaters were shut down, even if they never detonated the decompression charges, the dome’s temperature and air pressure would keep right on rising, powered by nothing but the SunSpot. It would likely blow all by itself in another day or so.

  “I wish to God there was something to do besides wait,” said Ashdin to Norla, as they stood in the doorway of the tomb.

  Norla laughed. The tension between them had eased during the night, somehow. Maybe it was just that even Wandella Ashdin had now been forced to admit her hero was something less than a genius and a saint. It couldn’t have been easy, sticking up for someone like DeSilvo as the evidence mounted against him. “Sign up for spaceside work if you want to find out what waiting is. All those years in cryo, just to make the time go past a little bit faster.”

  “I think we all could do with a bit of cryo just about now,” said Wandella. “Or anything cold.”

  “Amen to that,” Norla said without a trace of irony. Waking up in the midst of a literal inferno was enough to make a believer out of anyone. “I’m near to sweating to death.”

  “We’re near death in lots of ways,” Wandella said, looking out over the burning land.

  They had spent a sleepless night searching over every square inch of the structure, looking for something, anything, that might be a clue, a lead. A hairline crack in a wall that might conceal a secret compartment, a hidden lever, an inscription hidden from view, a puzzle hidden in the pattern of shapes and lines that might tell them to look there. But there was nothing. In the end, even Koffield had been convinced of that.

  They had searched as best they could. Others could do a better job after the blowout. Prolonged heating was not the best thing for marble, and the place would no doubt suffer damage in the blowout, but it would survive. And when it did, it would, no doubt, be taken apart, practically down to the molecular level. Norla doubted they would find anything, but the search had to be made.

  She turned her back on the flames and went to check on Koffield. Somehow, bless the man, he had found it in himself to rest, to sleep, in the midst of it all, there in his suit, on the floor of his enemy’s tomb, his head propped on the cool-down bag that held DeSilvo’s funerary urn. She checked his suit displays, the temp gauges in particular. Drifting toward the hig
h end, but still in the safe range. The cool-down bag was doing better, showing an interior temp of twenty-five degrees, a pleasant day in late spring.

  She looked to Koffield’s face, and saw his features twitch, his eyes moving back and forth under their lids. Was he having the sweet dreams he deserved, or merely reliving the nightmare he had wakened to when the Dom Pedro IV arrived in-system?

  So long as the man was granted rest, it almost did not matter.

  “Sleep,” Norla whispered to Anton. “Sleep.”

  “This is Research Dome Control. On my mark, three minutes to blowout. Mark.”

  “We read, Research Dome. Ready when you are,” said Norla. “Boy, are we ever ready.”

  They would not have been able to hold out much longer. The sweat was pouring down their bodies. All of them needed water. Their suit helmets were starting to fog over. The low humming of their suit coolers had spooled up to a banshee wail that made it hard to hear or understand anyone else.

  Norla checked her tie-downs again, and made good and damn sure she was strapped in tightly to the big marble sphere. Koffield, wide-awake and alert, was to her left. The cool-down bag with the urn inside was strapped down between Norla and Koffield. Wandella Ashdin, semiconscious and badly dehydrated, was on Norla’s right. Their suits had drinking-water tubes and nutritab dispensers that could be operated by chin and tongue levers, but they had to use the food and water sparingly—and Ashdin was already close to depleting her water.

  Staying in the tomb, and tying themselves down to the marble globe, had not so much been the best choice they could make, but merely the least bad. It seemed more prudent to risk the slight chance of the tomb collapsing rather than the near certainty of getting slapped around by flying debris outside. And if the roof did cave in, the globe itself would likely protect them. If nothing else, being tied down to a multiton stone sphere ensured they wouldn’t be going anywhere when the decompression blast hit.

  Norla was facing the east end of the tomb, the entrance-way that framed the swirling, smoking chaos outside. “I guess we’ve got a front-row seat to Armageddon,” she said.

  “No,” said Koffield. “A front-row seat on the future. Unless, somehow, somewhere, we find some answers, some solutions, then out there, on the dried-out wreckage of Sunflower, is the future of every settlement, every habitat, every human world, aside from Earth herself.”

  “Do you think it might be that the answers are in here?” Norla asked, patting the cool-down bag.

  “I wish I did, but no. I can’t believe in magic, or wish fulfillment. Besides, can you imagine Oskar DeSilvo finding the way to save the universe, and then going to all this trouble just to see to it that someone else got the credit?”

  “No,” said Norla with a bitter laugh. “It does sound a trifle out of character.”

  “This is Research Dome Control. On my mark, two minutes to blowout. Mark.”

  “Message received. Two minutes,” said Koffield. “Try to wake up Dr. Ashdin. She’ll never live it down if she sleeps through Armageddon. Let her take some water. One way or the other, there’s no sense in hoarding it now. An hour from now, we’ll either be dead, or they’ll be doing pickup on us and running us to the decontamination station.”

  Norla nodded, and took a sip of her own water. “Wandella,” she said, shaking Ashdin to rouse her. “Wake up. You’re going to miss it.”

  “What? Huh? What? Oh.” Ashdin blinked, sat up, and looked around. “I’m sorry. I drifted out for a while.”

  “Anything that passes the time,” said Norla. “Go ahead and take some water.”

  Ashdin nodded and sucked greedily at her suit’s water tube. Norla looked at her worriedly. Wandella Ashdin was a mess. A dirty, sleepless, hungry, frightened mess. Norla knew she and Koffield didn’t look any better. “We’re going to get through this,” she said. “We’re almost there. Just a little while longer.”

  “This is Research Dome Control. One minute to blowout. Stand by for explosive decompression. Commence all safety precautions.”

  “Like what?” Norla asked.

  “Just hang on,” said Koffield. “Hold on and make it through, that’s all.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Silence that surely must have lasted far longer than ten seconds.

  “Twenty seconds. All charges primed and armed. All safety circuits off.”

  And again, a wait that lasted far too long.

  “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”

  It was going to happen. Suddenly the moment they had wished for so devoutly these last twenty-four hours seemed far too close. . “Four. Three. Two. One.”

  “Ze—”

  The world was shattered by a thousand blasts of thunder, booming, rumbling, roaring all around them. Even through their helmets, the sound was impossibly large. The ground shook, bucking and heaving. The sky outside the tomb lit up as if jolted by a sky full of lightning, as the dome was literally split asunder in a thousand places. The first of the shock waves hit them, a wall of compressed air that punched through the entrance of the tomb and slapped them back against the marble globe. Clouds of dust erupted from every corner of the tomb, and the globe itself rocked back and forth ever so slightly, just enough to provide Norla with the terrifying image of the giant weight rolling over on top of them.

  The globe held steady, but the rest of the world did not.Bits of marble bounced and pinged around the tomb as the walls and floors suddenly sprouted new cracks and stress breaks that were not part of Oskar DeSilvo’s sterile, platitudinous geometry.

  The explosions went on and on, and did not truly end, but instead were merely subsumed into a new and more terrifying sound, the screaming, roaring wail of megatons of air blasting its way out into cold space. New shock waves shook and rattled the tomb as jets of air went supersonic in their rush out of the dome. Norla watched in horrified fascination as cyclones sprouted out of nowhere and marched across the landscape, ripping up everything in their paths. Two of the twisters collided and blew each other apart.

  The wind screamed and howled and bellowed, and the air was full of debris that flew in all directions. A massive tree dropped to the ground directly in front of the tomb entrance, and a violent gust of wind threw branches, sticks, mud, and gravel into their faces. They raised their arms to protect their faceplates. One piece of gravel zinged into Norla’s helmet, starring the armored transplex, but not breaking it.

  Water precipitated violently out of the air as the pressure dropped and the cold of space struck at the dome’s interior. Sheets of rain slammed into the superheated ground and immediately erupted into columns of steam and water vapor.

  Then, somehow, the terrifying chaos began to subside. The last of the wind and air howled away. Sound itself faded away as the air that bore the sound jetted out into space.

  The violence of air in motion gave way to the stillness of vacuum—and the silence of the tomb.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Ocean of Years

  “Are we ready?” Koffield asked.

  “Ready as we’re going to be,” said Wandella Ashdin.

  “Not like we have much else to do for the next month,” said Norla.

  “All right then,” Koffield said. “Let’s get started.”

  In spite of the rigorous decontamination scrub-down they had gotten while still in their suits, and then once again when they were out of them, Koffield, Norla, and Ashdin had been put under a thirty-day quarantine. They had been shut away in a bioisolation bunker connected to, though at present sealed off from, Research Dome. None of them liked it, but there was little they could do about it.

  The funerary urn itself, and everything else they had brought back from Founder’s Dome, had been sealed in with them. The decontamination crews had run the urn through a chemical decontamination, but that could only sterilize the exterior. Obviously, since they had no idea what might be in it, they couldn’t risk heat-sterilizing it. Just as obviously, no one could know for sure what was inside it, a
nd after going through the trouble, expense, and trauma of blowing a dome, the good people of Research Dome were not interested in taking needless risks. If it were going to be opened, it would be opened in quarantine. After a day spent cleaning up and recovering, not only from two days in overheated pressure suits but from the decontamination process itself, it was time to do the job.The urn was a simple cylinder about thirty centimeters in diameter and sixty centimeters deep. They had set it at the center of a worktable in Research Dome’s quarantine facility. After a brief examination, it was obvious that the urn opened by simply unscrewing the flush-mounted lid. Anton Koffield carefully put his hands on the lid and began to turn it. It resisted for a moment, then began to turn smoothly, if not easily.

  Koffield glanced over at Ashdin, standing on the other side of the table, ready to assist. Norla was working a long-watch camera, making a permanent, unerasable record of whatever they found, moving in and around the table to get close-ups as needed.

  “It’s coming,” Koffield said. “The threading is very tight, but it’s coming. Dr. Ashdin, if you could come around the other side and help me lift it off. It’s quite heavy, and I want to do it carefully.”

  Wandella came over, took one side of the lid, and helped Koffield turn it through the last few windings of the thread. The excitement, the tension in the room was almost palpable. Koffield looked at Norla, and she looked back at him. He saw a strange blend of anticipation and fear in her eyes and had no doubt he wore the same expression.

  “Here we go. That’s got it loose,” he said. “Lift it away on my count. One, two—three.”

  They lifted the heavy lid up away from the urn and set it to one side on the table.

  They all three looked down into the urn. Disappointment slapped at Koffield. Ashes. After all that, nothing but ashes.

  “Dammit!” Norla cried out. “It can’t be.”

  “It isn’t,” Koffield said, holding himself calm. It was the slightest of setbacks, he told himself, and one that he had more or less expected. It had to be merely one more disguise, one more layer of trickery. He peered into the urn and saw what he was searching for. “Look more carefully. Those are ashes, all right—but they don’t take up more than a quarter of the cylinder’s depth. There’s a false bottom. Dr. Ashdin, bring that bowl over here if you will. Set it down on the table, and help me pour out whoever, or whatever, these ashes are.”