The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Fm done here,” he said, brushing the dirt from the knees of his trousers. “Come with me back into the house.”

  Fribart nodded gravely and fell in step with him as Parrige walked toward the exit. Parrige paused a moment at the exit hatch. He always hated to leave his garden. It was not just that he regretted leaving the place where he was happiest. It was that the very act of leaving, the complicated process of going in and out, forced him to break out of his own denials and illusions. When it was time to leave, he could no longer pretend that all was normal, that the garden was as it once had been. He could no longer pretend he did not notice the bubble-dome, no longer pretend he could not hear the low hum of the atmosphere re-processor.

  Fribart stepped into the airlock ahead of him, and Parrige, reluctantly, followed him in, taking one last breath of the fresh, fecund, moist air, one last indulgence in the scent of green and living things. He sealed the inner hatch and waited as the force-filter field activated.

  There was breathable air on both sides of the lock, of course—but the air inside the garden dome was conditioned, humidified, ion-balanced, invigorating. The outside air was none of those things—and Parrige had no desire to expose his flowers to the rogue microbes and molds and parasites that seemed to be evolving into new and cruder forms with every passing day. The filter-field airlock kept the inner and outer air away from each other with all but perfect efficiency.

  He looked down toward the floor of the chamber as the filter field came to life, a shimmering grey sheet of blank-ness that completely hid the bottom of the chamber from view. The filter field started moving upward, pushing the live air back up into the ceiling vents and back into the garden dome, and drawing in the dry, desiccated air of the outside world from the floor vents. The field flowed upward, looking like a pool of glassy-smooth grey water rising up around them. The field flowed around their bodies with the faintest tremor of contained power as the static charge flowed upward along with the field. The garden air rushed up around him, forced out by the filter field. Parrige watched as the field swallowed up his feet, his legs, his torso. It was impossible to force down altogether the sense of panic as the field rose toward his chest, his throat, his head. It was too easy to believe he was caught in the rising flood, that the water was swallowing him up and he was about to drown.

  The field swept up over his face, and the feel of living air against his skin was gone. The harsh dry air of the outside slapped up against him. Parrige looked up to watch the field, still moving upward toward the ceiling of the chamber, where it paused, its work completed, before vanishing as if it had never been. The outer hatch swung open and the unfiltered light of the outside world poured in. They were out of the garden.

  Fribart let out a sigh of completely undisguised relief and satisfaction as they stepped out into the too-harsh, too-bright, too-hot light of the unfiltered Solacian day and moved out into the death-dry air and the hot, dusty, brown landscape.

  Was Fribart to be pitied because he preferred the harshness of the outside over the coddled confines of the garden dome? Fribart had found a way to pretend that the current climate suited him, and was the way it should be, even as he worried about its decline. Certainly that was foolish.

  And yet, Parrige wondered, should he himself be the one to be pitied, or even reviled, for preferring to hide away in a simulation of the world as it no longer was, for pretending that all the world was as lovely as his garden?

  “Tell me, Fribart. You don’t really prefer this shriveled landscape over my garden, do you?”

  Fribart offered up the slightest of shrugs, the tiniest possible gesture of apology. “I suppose I do, sir. It is what I am used to. Perhaps, once the local climate recovers its normal state, I’ll find it too damp, too muggy—like your garden. If things had remained as they were, it might be that I would enjoy your garden. But whatever went wrong has already gone wrong. I have changed, and the world has too.” Fribart looked up into the sky, and Parrige followed his gaze.

  The fat gleaming dot of Solace Central Orbital Station was plainly visible in the western sky. As they watched, a dot of light flared and moved away from the station as a large spacecraft of some sort launched itself.

  “Big,” Fribart said. “Probably a timeshaft ship, a star ship,” he said.

  “We don’t see many of those anymore,” Parrige said. “I remember when there were ships coming every few days, not every few months.”

  “If only we could do what they do,” said Fribart. “The timeshaft ships drop back in time. Wouldn’t it be splendid if we could go back and fix the mistake or the problem, whatever it was that got us into trouble, and then come back?”

  Parrige took an involuntary half step back from his assistant, as if he subconsciously expected a bolt of lightning to smite the man in two. “Dangerous talk, friend Fribart,” he said. “The Chronologic Patrol has little sense of humor. Don’t joke, even in private, about such things.”

  Fribart blinked hard in surprise and turned his attention from the sky to his companion. His eyes widened in alarm. “What? Oh! No! No, of course not. You’re quite right, Master Parrige. Quite right. Forgive me.”

  “Let us be on our way, then, and hear no more about such things.” Parrige was astonished by his companion’s behavior. Fribart was a conformist, if ever any man had been such a thing—and his whimsical little idea about using time travel to fix Solace was as black a heresy as any could be. There could not be any more dangerous thought. In literal fact, the interstellar transport timeshafts allowed for travel back through time, that much was true. But that was not what they were there for. There was no blacker crime than attempting to use the timeshafts to make a purposeful, intentional trip to one’s own past on one’s own world.

  Paradoxes, changes to history, unintended consequences— it was impossible to imagine the chaos that would be unleashed by such an act, however well intentioned.

  Things were worse than he believed, Parrige told himself. They had to be bad when as unimaginative and rigid a man as Fribart started fantasizing about the commission of desperate crimes in the pursuit of magical answers to their problems.

  But the worst of it was this: A man like Fribart would dare imagine such things only after he started to believe, subconsciously at least, that there was no hope outside of desperation and magic.

  If even men like Fribart were starting to think that way, then, it seemed to Parrige, things could not hold together very much longer.

  CHAPTER FIVE Socks in the Sour

  “It’s quite a terrible stink, isn’t it?” the biotechnician asked, his voice apologetic. He stood on the moldering pier and looked down at the greasy green water of Lake Virtue, a body of water that wasn’t remotely near living up to its name.

  The slope of the shore was very gentle at this end, and the pier wasn’t long enough to get out toward really deep water. The pier’s boardwalk was all of a meter above the lake surface, and probably the water below it was no more than a meter and a half deep. But no one would wish to get closer to that water than necessary.

  “No worse than I expected,” Neshobe Kalzant replied. She turned to Parrige, a step or two behind her on the pier. “Though you’ll agree that’s not saying the smell is pleasant.”

  “That much is certain,” Parrige replied. Dead fish, decaying vegetation, a rotten-egg stench—far from the most enjoyable of bouquets. He certainly felt no desire to experience it any longer than he had to.

  “It was worse a month ago, if you can imagine that,” said the biotech. Parrige concentrated for a moment on the pro forma introductions at the brief ceremony when their ajrcar had landed. Milos Vandar. That was the fellow’s name. He was an amiable-looking sort of chap, tall and thin, long-faced, with an impressive hook nose that could have looked sinister if the man’s expression had not been so open and friendly. He had nondescript brown eyes, and brown hair that had obviously been ferociously combed down into place for their arrival. By now, twenty minutes later, it was alr
eady wandering out of control, back to what was obviously its customary state: drifting into Vandar’s eyes and starting to stick up around his ears.

  “Mind you,” Vandar went on, “it doesn’t look any better than it did back then. Not at this shore. Not yet. But it does smell better here—or at least less bad. We’re definitely registering improvement.”

  Improvement. There was a word Parrige had heard but rarely in recent times—and it was the word they had come in search of. He stepped forward a trifle and looked at the greasy water a bit more closely.

  “So you’re turning it around,” Neshobe suggested.

  Vandar shrugged, then squatted at the end of the pier, staring out at the greasy green scum on the water. “I suppose you could put it that way. Lake Virtue is so far down there’s not much place to go but up. If there is any way to go down from here, I don’t want to know about it. But yes, we’ve got some nice clear positive upticks. Oxygen levels, water clarity, populations of desirable species. We’re getting there.”

  “That’s what we’re here to hear,” Neshobe said.

  Or, more accurately, that’s what we’re here to be seen hearing, Parrige thought, glancing toward the infostream service techs on the shore. The point of the exercise was to have Neshobe Kalzant shown in connection with an ecological recovery project. It almost didn’t matter which project. At least it wasn’t an act. Madam Kalzant was genuinely, even urgently, interested in the recovery program. He watched as she knelt at the very edge of the pier, staring intently at the green sludge below as the biotech explained something or other.

  With Neshobe’s back turned, Parrige half-instinctively took advantage of the moment to move back from the edge of the pier, and a bit closer to the shore. He had never much cared for open water, particularly water this foul. Fribart, who, it would seem, believed even less in the lake’s virtues, waited on land, standing on the path leading to the dock, the news-service reporters standing behind him.

  The wind shifted for a moment, blowing a particularly pungent gust of rancid lake air right into the knot of reporters. It was almost worth the inconvenience of the trip to see Fri bait’s expression at that moment.

  But there were other matters to deal with. He turned back toward Neshobe and Vandar at the end of the pier. “So what went wrong?” Parrige asked, moving a cautious step or two back toward the pier’s end.

  “Classic socks-in-the-soup infestation,” Vandar said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Parrige asked.

  “Sorry,” said Vandar. “That’s our slang term for it. Introduction of an uncontrolled organism. Someone drops their dirty socks with who-knows-what bacteria on them into the soup, the environment, and the bacteria start in growing. The introduced organism doesn’t have any natural enemies or internal kill switches, so it’s hard to repress, never mind eliminate.”

  Neshobe nodded thoughtfully, but Parrige was not much better off for having received that explanation. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t know what a kill switch is.”

  “You should,” Neshobe said. “There’s only one species of life-form allowed on this planet without one, and you’re it.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Parrige said, more confused than ever, and now even a trifle alarmed. “Should I have one?”

  “It’s not you personally who doesn’t have one,” Vandar said, smiling. “It’s all of us. Humans. We’re the only species legally allowed on-planet without having at least one, and generally two or three, genetically engineered kill switches inserted into our DNA.”

  “Every other authorized species on-planet has some sort of booby trap built in,” Neshobe explained. “Something that will respond to a certain stimulus by inducing death. Some way we can kill some or all of a species in a given area without having to kill anything else. Usually a very specific artificial toxin, but it can be anything from tuned hypersonics to a particular frequency of coherent light. Whatever the switch is, if it turns out we’ve made a mistake, and the species isn’t right for whatever niche it’s in, we can undo the mistake.”

  “But there’s always something that gets in that isn’t supposed to,” Vandar went on, obviously quite unmindful that he was interrupting the planetary leader. “A bacterium that comes in on some spacecraft that doesn’t get a proper decontamination, some vermin or another that hides out in a food shipment, some damn fool pet someone smuggles in. Something. And one of those somethings is the species of algae that’s infested this lake. There’s nothing in this lake that’s willing to eat it.

  “But the real problem is that by now it’s embedded itself in the local ecosystem. It’s too well established. There’s no longer any way to eradicate it without killing everything else in the lake and the surrounding countryside. And even if we did that, it’s probably hitchhiked on a bird or two by now, or else traveled via windborne transmission, or even had itself carried up in convected water that’s already rained down somewhere else. Which means either it already has or it probably will spread from here to other lakes and rivers and so on. We have to assume that, from here on in, it’s part of the planet’s ecology, and we have to figure out ways to live with it.”

  “What have you brought in to control it?” Neshobe asked.

  “Nothing too fancy. We sent samples of the algae and the water and so on up to Greenhouse, and they managed to locate several organisms they had on file that’d happily eat the algae in question. Two looked like reasonable fits into the local ecosystem, with minor modifications. Greenhouse modified the candidate organisms, ran mathematical simulations and real-life trials, and confirmed the fix would work. The modified rotifers and microshrimp will eat the algae and won’t overbreed themselves. Greenhouse bred up a stock of the new species and shipped them to us. We’ve started introduction at the south end of Virtue, and everything seems to be going well.

  We’ll let the first introduction run another week or so, and then perform wholesale introductions into the entire lake and connected waterbeds. And, of course, we have the needed mods of the microshrimp and the rotifers on file if we get another outbreak.”

  “Excellent,” Neshobe said. “First-class work all the way.” She stood up, turned her back on the lake, and headed back toward Fribart and the newspeople. The whole point of the operation was to have them see her here, to have them report back to the people at large that Neshobe Kalzant was there on the scene, learning all about the latest and most advanced techniques for rebuilding the Solacian climate. It would tell her people that she was doing something positive—and that something positive was being done. A good morale booster, and a good way to improve her image, which had gotten a bit roughed up in recent days.

  Certainly such staged events were far from new in the world of politics, but they had never been seen before on Solace. Before Neshobe Kalzant, politics and government hadn’t been particularly public.

  But now the public was paying attention. Neshobe understood the importance of playing to the public, of putting her story before them. Thus today’s visit to a malodorous lake. Parrige had set the whole thing up himself— and had done so, needless to say, over Fribart’s vehement objections, on any number of grounds. It was his first venture into political theater, and, modest though the effort might have been, it had gone well. He was pleased with the result, and was already thinking ahead to what might be done next.

  But there was another part of him that was less than satisfied. He stepped to one side to let Neshobe pass, and then fell into step with Vandar as the scientist followed her toward the press. Parrige put a hand on Vandar’s arm, holding him back just a trifle, slowing him down. “It all sounds very good,” he said. “But this is just one medium-sized lake with one relatively simple, even routine problem.”

  “What of it?” Vandar asked, his voice” as cheerful and open as his face.

  “Well, I have two questions, actually. It took a fairly large effort, and extensive resources, for you to be able to solve this problem. Does it always take that much time and effor
t to compensate for an algae infestation?”

  “Sometimes,” Vandar said carefully. “Sometimes it’s a lot easier. But, on balance, I’d have to admit that this was a comparatively simple fix. There have been lots of others we’ve put more time in on.”

  “And there could easily be more and bigger problems in future. One only a bit more complex than this one could absorb all of your people’s time and attention for an extended period. Even overwhelm you completely. Or you could just be caught by the fact that a planet is a big place. You could easily miss a crisis as big as this one, or even bigger.”

  “Right again,” Vandar said. “We have missed crises worse than this. Plenty of times. We’re only now getting good at detecting them early on.” They had come to the end of the pier, and paused there. “What’s your other problem?”

  “I gather that you needed Greenhouse in order to do the fix at all. Is that correct?”

  “Absolutely. I suppose we could have done it down here, but it would have been far more difficult. They’re the ones with the resources and facilities and the controlled environments. What’s your point?”

  “Greenhouse won’t last forever. DeSilvo’s original terra-forming schedule called for it to be shut down over seventy years ago. The engineers have performed all sorts of clever tricks to keep it up and running this long. They’ve done it so brilliantly for so long that most people just assume that it will last forever. The reality is that each time they patch it up for a bit longer, it becomes even more fragile. And most people think of it just as a research facility—not as a vitally needed repair center. What do we do when it finally gives out?”

  Parrige had half expected Vandar to get defensive, or to deny the problems were there. Instead the man smiled sadly at him and shook his head. “You’re pretty good at finding tough questions, aren’t you?” he asked, and then starting walking on toward Neshobe Kalzant and the newspeople.