The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “You think those might not be DeSilvo’s?” Norla asked.

  “I’ve given up believing anything I can’t prove,” Koffield said. “Take the other side of the cylinder, Doctor. Easy now.”

  The ashes poured out into the bowl. For the most part they were fine and powdery, but there were a few bits of incompletely burned bone here and there, as well as a tooth. Koffield examined the ashes thoughtfully. “Very interesting indeed. Norla—Officer Chandray. Get a good close-up on that tooth. It’s definitely not human. I’m no expert on animal dentition, but it looks as if someone cremated a large mammal of some sort—a pig, I do believe— and then failed to sift the ashes properly. Someone didn’t cover his tracks quite as carefully as he should have.”

  Koffield ran a wipe-down cloth over the interior of the urn. It was plain to see now that the upper chamber took up very little of the volume of the urn.

  Ashdin peered into the interior, then pointed at a set of five dark ovals that looked very much like blobs of near-ancient sealing wax, set into the base of the chamber in a radial pattern, each sealed across what might very well be the edge of an inner lid. “Those look like memory polymer resin thumbprint seals,” she said.

  It was the same sort of seal that had been used to seal up the personal property chamber on Koffield’s cryotank. If the proper thumb pressed down on the resin, it would dissolve away, but it would only respond to the preprogrammed prints, or to whatever other criteria had been set into it.

  “So they do,” said Koffield thoughtfully. “So they do. I wonder if I could get you and Officer Chandray to try them.”

  Ashdin was obviously hesitant about putting her hands into a funerary urn, but it seemed she could not think of any logical reason for refusing. She tried both of her thumbs, and then all her fingers, on all five of the seals, without result. Norla handed off the camera to Koffield and tried herself, but nothing happened.Koffield handed the camera back to Norla. “Let’s see if I have any better luck. I wish we could get Marquez down here to try him as well, but I don’t think anyone is going to be patient enough to wait for that. Make sure you have a good clear field of view with that camera.”

  Anton Koffield pressed his right thumb down onto the first seal and held it there for a few seconds.

  And the seal crumbled away.

  Ashdin gasped.

  Norla let out a low whistle and shook her head. “I’d call that pretty convincing evidence that you were expected,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Koffield. “Oh, yes indeed.” Slowly, purposefully, he pressed his thumb down onto each of the remaining seals in turn. All of them dissolved as neatly and perfectly as the first. Koffield took another wipe-down cloth and cleaned the seal residue out and examined the interior again.

  “See that?” he said. “Get a good shot of that. There were latches under the seals.” He reached in and flipped each of the latches open, one by one. The lid popped up as the last latch came free.

  And Anton Koffield lifted out the inner lid of the urn.

  “It looks as if there’s—there’s a stack of things in here,” he said for the benefit of the camera’s recording. “Each in its own padded receptacle. The first is a datacube.” He lifted it out, his heart pounding, his fingers trembling. He removed it from its padding, and read the label.

  “My datacube,” he said quietly. “The one I thought I was traveling with when I came to Solace.” He reached into the urn again, removed the next item, and took it out of its padding. But the first had been more than enough to tell him what the second was. “The printed book version of the same data,” he announced. “Again, the copy I thought I was carrying.”

  Koffield looked at Norla, holding the cube in one hand and the book in the other. “I don’t know what to say,” he told her. “Does this, do these vindicate me? I’m glad to have them, but why did DeSilvo—send them to me after stealing them from me?”

  “I think it looks a great deal like he had a change of heart,” said Wandella Ashdin. “It’s a damned peculiar way to make amends, but I think that’s what it is.”

  “What else is in there?” Norla asked.

  Koffield pulled out a thicker, padded container, and opened it up. “Dear God in heaven,” he said. “Baskaw’s books. Hard-copy printouts of Ulan Baskaw’s books. Either they’re copies of the Grand Library Permanent Physical Collection file copies, or else DeSilvo simply stole the PPC’s copies.”

  “Why send you Baskaw’s books?” Wandella asked.

  “It’s proof,” Norla said. “He’s given the admiral proof that everything he said was true. And it’s a confession as well. Of plagiarism and more. Baskaw’s books should have told DeSilvo what he was doing wouldn’t work. Oskar DeSilvo has just admitted his guilt. To Admiral Koffield, to you, and to all of Solace.”

  Koffield nodded. The what of it he could follow. But he could not see the motive, the why. “It makes no sense!” he protested. He set down Baskaw’s books and opened one, and flipped through the pages. “Why did he do it? Why confess? Why confess to me, and in this way?”

  “I don’t know,” Norla said. “I don’t know.”

  Wandella looked into the urn. “Ah, Admiral, there’s something still in there. It looks like a letter.”

  Koffield looked up at her in surprise. He looked around the room, his hindbrain telling him to scan the horizon, look to see what quarter of the horizon the next mad surprise would come from. But the room was quiet, calm, deadly silent. He looked down into the urn. An envelope, facedown, sat on the bottom of it.

  A letter. A message in a bottle, thrown out into the ocean of years. Against all odds it had come to shore, and into the right hands, a century and a quarter later.

  He reached in and took it out.

  It was a most old-fashioned sort of letter indeed, on paper and sealed into an envelope, a form that was itself merely a fashionably old-fashioned copy of a technique used by the near ancients. Koffield turned the envelope over and read the writing on the outside.Admiral Anton Koffield 18083-19109-SQN-115-APTO-205-APO-34030

  “Oh my God,” said Koffield. He slumped back and sat on the edge of the table. The hurt, the shock, was intense enough to be physical. He had been hit, hit hard, struck down by a mighty blow that came from nowhere at all. “Oh my God in heaven.”

  “What is it?” Norla demanded.

  Anton turned the envelope over and showed it to her. “The code key under my name. The code key^ It is—was— the command-code prefix for the Circum Central worm-hole. This key, and the right command codes and suffixes, are all you’d need to control the Circum Central worm-hole. DeSilvo is saying he could—and did—send ships through it.”

  “ What? “ Norla half shouted.

  Suddenly his mind was reeling. It was madness. It was insanity. But it fit the pattern. “It’s the same way he admitted to sabotaging the Dom Pedro IV and stealing my data,” Koffield said. “He’s saying he was responsible for the attack on Circum Central. Dr. Oskar DeSilvo is telling us he sent in the Intruders that jumped my wormhole. He’s saying he killed my crew members, stranded the Upholder, and destroyed the Standfast.”

  “That’s impossible,” Norla protested. “Only the Chronologic Patrol can—”

  Koffield thrust the envelope into her face with a trembling hand, “Without this code prefix, yes. But if he could get this code, he must have cracked into the full command system. With these codes, he could control that worm-hole.”

  “The letter,” Norla said. “Read the letter.”

  Koffield nodded. He turned the envelope over, unsealed it, pulled out the letter, and began to read out loud.

  “ ‘My Dear Admiral Koffield,’ “ Koffield began.

  As you no doubt have already surmised, this letter is a confession. I write this some thirteen years after you embarked for Solace—that is to say, thirteen years after I sabotaged your ship and stole your documentary evidence that suggested that the terra-formation of Solace was doomed to failure. If you do indeed receive
this letter, I would expect you to do so roughly one hundred and fourteen standard years from now. I imagine you visiting Greenhouse and touring the sites, or casually flipping through a book of notable monuments—and seeing, in person, or in a photograph, the message I have arranged to leave for you. Or perhaps you will simply come to wonder what could have possibly possessed me to place my tomb on Greenhouse, of all the unlikely and unpleasant places.

  “He got that part wrong,” said Wandella.

  “We came damn close to never looking at the tomb at all,” Norla agreed. “If Founder’s Dome had been blown before we got here, would we have ever even heard of DeSilvo’s Tomb?”

  “Sooner or later,” Koffield said. “But would it have dawned on me to realize how little sense it made for the tomb to be on Greenhouse? If we hadn’t been on Greenhouse when we were—anyway, we did find the tomb, and we understood it. That’s all that matters. He wasn’t all that wrong.” Koffield returned to the letter.

  At the time you left for Solace, I believed in my own work, and thought your analysis to be completely—and dangerously—wrong. I believed that, if anyone’listened to you, it would result in upheaval, panic, and economic collapse. Your warnings, I thought, could cause the deaths of thousands, perhaps millions.

  It was not generally known at the time, but the terraforming projects finances were in a most delicate stage at the time in question. Controversy could have killed the project altogether. I thus had to find a way to stop you without confronting you, or starting a public debate.

  Fortunately, as the head of a large enterprise, great resources were at my command. At the same time, I have long been skilled in techniques of technical espionage, as you, by this time, clearly have reason to know. Not wishing to harm you, but not wishing you to be heard, I sabotaged the Dom Pedro IV and abstracted your evidence from your luggage. The precise details of how I did this are unimportant.

  “And besides, he might want to use the same trick again sometime,” Norla said bitterly. “Why tell how it was done?”

  It was not until long after your departure that I returned and studied Baskaw’s work again, and studied your own expansion of her argument, and your synthesis of it with the current state of the art in terraforming practice. It was only then that I began to see the truth. By then, the terraforma-tion of Solace was too far advanced to be stopped without great loss of life and treasure. The main population of settlers were already on-planet in force. It was too late.

  “Do you believe that?” asked Norla.

  “I don’t know,” Koffield said. “I can’t quite believe he wouldn’t be able to make sense of Baskaw’s work before then, but it might be possible. I’m sure that DeSilvo believed it by the time he wrote this letter.” He went on.

  You have likely guessed much of this already. What I believe you cannot have known before examining the envelope of this letter is that I interfered with you before.

  I sent the robotic ships that later came to be known as the Intruders through the Circum Central wormhole. I will discuss the purpose of their mission in a moment, but I must emphasize several other points before I do so.

  First and foremost, I never intended to harm anyone, or damage any ship. But my ineptitude and ignorance of military matters, combined with a perverse streak of bad luck, were too much for my good intentions.

  Second, and this, I believe, is the deepest irony of the entire matter, it was the injury I did to you, quite unintentionally, at Circum Central, and the guilt I felt, that inspired me to seek you out at the Grand Library, and, if you will, take you under my wing, give you a purpose in life. I had greater reasons than you yet realize for thinking that I had done you a grave injury at Circum Central, but more of that in a moment. It was my miscalculation, and mine alone, that failed to take into account your remarkable competence and relentless tenacity.

  I have since had occasion to examine your military record in some detail, including your service in the intelligence department. Suffice it to say, that had I known so much about you before, I would have steered well clear of you, rather than inviting you to research the history of the Solace Terraforming Project. It was, of course, during that research that you discovered my academic crimes, my plagiarisms. And all spiraled out from there.

  You will no doubt also have come to suspect already that my tomb was not my tomb. It is not. It is no one’s tomb. The ashes are as false as the reports of my recent death.

  What you likely have not yet divined are my reasons for this present, elaborately concealed, confession. One reason is obvious, so obvious that even I can now see it. I have failed. Failed utterly and ignobly, failed because I ignored facts I did not find convenient, failed because I believed I could make the world, the universe, fit the mold I decreed.

  But I have accomplished great things, and learned far more secrets than those that Ulan Baskaw taught me. There is much to be found in the most secret places of the Grand Library, and in other archives. Remarkable technologies of all sorts have been deliberately suppressed, by those who believe is it best for human society to remain nearly static, and progress with glacial slowness, if at all. Perhaps they were once right to so think, but their time is past.

  You need only look to the events of the Circum Central incident to know that is true. The ships you called the Intruders did indeed exceed light-speed.

  “Light-speed!” Wandella protested. “That’s impossible. That’s the whole reason for the timeshaft-wormhole system.”

  “I agree,” said Koffield. “But the detection records from the Upholder showed otherwise, even if that point wasn’t talked about much in public. The Intruders accelerated up past where we could detect them at all, and then just vanished. When they came back, they did the same thing in reverse. It looked a hell of a lot like light-speed to us.”

  “Read the letter,” said Norla.

  But failure is not mine alone, Koffield went on. Humanity itself is failing. The enterprise of our interstellar civilization is subject to the same physical and mathematical laws as Solace. All our worlds are doomed. I share my crimes with every other terraformer in history.

  “That’s special pleading if ever I heard it,” said Norla. “Every other terraformer in history was ignorant of Baskaw’s work. He knew.”

  “He probably knew,” Koffield said. “Maybe he was just criminally incompetent. And he does have a point. All of humanity is in big trouble.” He went on reading.

  I have done wrong. There is no question of that. But to whom would I turn myself in? What crime, in what jurisdiction, have I committed? What punishment would be meted out to me, and who would judge me? I believe the answer is that there is no judge, no court, legally competent to judge this case, and thus there are no legal means to judge me, or determine suitable punishment or rehabilitation for me. In the absence of such legal authority if I were to go to the public, and tell all of Settled Space of Ulan Baskaw’s work, I believe that it would be likely, perhaps even highly probable, that I would fall to mob violence, or a revenge bomb thrown by some relative or another of someone who died on Solace. How many others would be hurt or killed in the unrest such news would surely inspire?

  If I exposed myself to a legal system that could not judge me, and was then thus killed, I could do no good to anyone at all. And I have great good to offer, prizes of knowledge and technology that I alone can give.

  “In other words, he didn’t just steal Baskaw’s work,” said Norla. “He found other discoveries he could grab. So what? And why should we believe him?”

  “I can give one answer to both questions. He demonstrated faster-than-light travel,” said Koffield. “That’s what he’s offering as a sample. It suggests that the main course could be impressive. If we believe him. It could all be trickery.”

  “He’s done a good job of making his cowardice look like courage,” Norla said. “He’s not afraid to come out and face us, or the people of Solace. He’s just afraid that if we kill him, someone else might get hurt, and he wouldn�
��t be in a position to do nice things for us.”

  “I don’t know if I’d put it quite that way, but it sure sounds like he’s setting up his arguments for cutting a deal,” said Wandella. “But what’s the deal?”

  I have much that I can offer, but much of what I can offer will not be accepted willingly. Drastic ideas will not be welcome until the situation is desperate. Until then, the doomsayers will be ignored, shoved to one side, reviled and punished.

  “Fine and noble words coming from him,” said Norla. “He punished me, punished everyone on the DP-IV, because he was afraid of your doomsaying.”

  Koffield nodded and read on,

  The collapse of Solace is coming. I believe that now. But I also believe that it will serve as a wake-up call, a warning to all the worlds. The more people that know about Baskaw’s work, the more likely that they will believe and listen. I believe they will be ready by the time you find this letter. At last, they will listen. At last, they can listen. I have, therefore, enclosed copies of her work and yours with this letter, that you might be better able to communicate these ideas to others.

  “The son of a bitch!” Norla shouted. “He makes it sound like the height of generosity to give back what he stole.”

  “Awfully decent of him,” Koffield agreed. The madman! The self-serving madman! He realized that his skin was flushed and his hands were sweating. But he had to keep control, keep calm. His vision seemed a bit clouded for some reason. He blinked and continued reading.

  Seek me out. I live, but slumber. I am hidden, but hidden where you can find me. Find me, and together, we can do great things. With the knowledge I have gathered, and the skill, courage, and determination you have so often demonstrated, we can, I believe, defeat the doom to which Ulan Baskaw has sentenced us.