The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Very well. Please give the longwatch a clear close-up of your data watch display.”

  Marquez took the datawatch off, shoved it in close to the longwatch, and then put it back on again. “All right,” he said, “now what?”

  “We’re nearly done here,” Koffield said. “Please answer a few more questions. I have either been in your presence, or in a sealed room, since revival. Correct?”

  “Correct. Assuming you’re not a magician, and the log has been working properly.”

  “And I have had no access to any source of meaningful information, except yourself, regarding present conditions on the planet Solace, or indeed on any other subject, since my revival?”

  “Ah, right,” Marquez said, clearly growing more cautious and more confused. “If the event recorder log is accurate, that’s right.”

  “Please tell me all that you know about present conditions on Solace.”

  “How the hell would I know?” Marquez asked irritably. “We’re a hundred twenty-seven years overdue. About the same as it was last time I was here, I guess. All I know is that it’s still there, because I got a fix on it. Comm systems are all still locked out, and I haven’t exactly had time to send in long-range probes. I haven’t even sent in a query ping yet.”

  “You have no current information, and therefore could not possibly give me any. Is that correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Thank you. With all that established, I think I can now leave my quarters. If you could please take up the longwatch and keep it pointed more or less toward me, I’d like us to head back to the revival chamber now. I’ll carry the secured container.”

  Marquez seemed past responding. He simply picked up the camera and did as Koffield asked, following him out into the corridor and back toward the revival chamber.

  Koffield’s cryocan was still there, hanging on the service support, a meter or so above the deck. The can was a long white lozenge-shape, the coffin-type lid still open, and a slight residue of cryosleep gel still clinging to the can’s interior. The air in the revival chamber was redolent with the sickly sweet odor of oxidized cryosleep gel, gone bad the moment it came in contact with breathable air. The decomposing cryogel smelled exactly like rotting flesh. Memories of those nightmare times surged up into his mind, but he forced them all back down.

  Besides, it was not the can’s main interior that concerned him at the moment. There was a smaller compartment on the bottom end of the can, a forty-centimeter-wide pullout drawer directly below where the cryosleep subject’s feet would be. It was, in essence, the luggage compartment for the can.

  The use of cryosleep was not limited to space travel. Many medical patients used it to avoid further pain or physical degeneration during the months or years it might take to grow a replacement organ. Some overcrowded space habs might put a certain percentage of their populace on ice for a time—voluntarily or otherwise—to stretch food and air until new capacity could be built. Many military organizations trained their conscripted soldiers and froze them for the duration of their periods of service, reviving them only at the end of their conscription, or when and where a crisis developed. Ice soldiers, they called them.

  There were many uses, licit and illicit, for cryosleep, but no matter what reason there might be for freezing a person, there were few potential victims of crime more helpless than cryosleep subjects—and, aside from ice soldiers, cryo subjects tended to pay for their own cryo. Only very well off people could afford the extremely expensive process. It tended to be rich people who used cryo, and that meant the personal pack of a cryo canister was a most tempting target for thieves. Personal-pack compartments, therefore, were very well protected.

  Even the minimal drain of power on an electronic or photronic system could add up to a great deal of power, when multiplied over centuries of operation and the dozens or hundreds of cryocans that might be aboard a timeshaft ship. Personal-pack compartments were therefore usually sealed and locked by techniques and devices that would have been utterly familiar to any well-to-do citizen of nineteenth-century Earth. A dial-style combination lock and blobs of sealing wax might seem an incredibly old-fashioned, if not utterly antique, or even ancient, method of keeping valuables secure, but they worked.

  Even if they looked antique, both lock and sealing wax were made of quite modern and sophisticated materials. Any energy pulse strong enough to break open the lock would destroy the personal pack, the cryocan, and probably the thief. The sealing “wax” was a high-strength memory polymer resin, by itself strong enough to resist any attempt to pry it off, melt it off, or chip it off. In theory, at least, the seals would dissolve in response to Koffield’s thumbprint. On the other hand, 127 years was a long time for a memory polymer to remember a pattern. Sometimes the seals got temperamental after too long at low temperature.

  Koffield considered. The storage compartment was well sealed, that was for sure. Very safe. Perhaps he should leave the compartment sealed. But Marquez would have to start reviving his crew soon. What was the point of going to extreme measures to prove there had been no tampering around the cryocan so far if he turned around and let a dozen people loose around it later? There was no practical way of getting the entire cryocan itself into a secure area. Besides, he would have to take his personal pack out sooner or later to transport to—to whoever was out there. No, better to do it now, while Marquez was still willing to record the proceedings.

  “Captain,” Koffield said, still speaking as much to the camera as to the man holding it, “what I need now is for the longwatch to record the present state of the personal-pack compartment door, to demonstrate that it is still sealed and locked. Then if you would be so kind as to record me opening it, removing the object inside, and placing it in the secured container we have brought along, we’ll be done.”

  “Good,” Marquez said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Koffield knelt in front of the door and pressed his right thumb into the first of the eight seals. It was supposed to take no more than ten seconds for the polymer to respond, and he could feel the seal starting to shift and soften under his thumb after only five. It dissolved into a gritty sand that fell away from the compartment door and dropped to the deck with a quiet hiss. Seals two through six were equally well behaved, but the seventh gave him a bad moment, flatly refusing to respond to his thumbprint until he had tried it three times and leaned his thumb in hard for a full thirty seconds. Even then, it only broke up into eight or ten larger pieces that shattered like glass when they hit the deck. Well, never mind. The seal had come free. The eighth seal functioned properly, and he started on the thirty-digit lock combination. It opened without incident.

  Koffield glanced over his shoulder to be sure Marquez was still recording, then pulled the drawer open.

  Two travel cases. A medium-sized brown one, bought on the civilian market, and a smaller grey Chronologic Patrol standard-issue suitcase, battered and slightly the worse for wear, but still in good condition. Koffield pulled them out and held both up to the camera. “This larger case contains a few changes of clothes and other unimportant personal items.” He set it down and lifted the smaller case.

  “This is the important one,” he said. “Please observe that this travel case is sealed and locked, and that the seals are undisturbed and the locks are shut. Inside this suitcase is my work on the subject of forecasting the behavior of terraformed’ planets. It is stored in printed form on archival-quality paper, and in a standard static holographic datacube, a data-storage format designed to retain its integrity for at least fifty centuries. This case also contains a military-specification reader for the datacube. I hope and expect that the data on one or both of these two formats will have survived the trip without decaying or degrading. I will now place this case in this secured container, seal and lock the container, and attach the longwatch to the secured container in such a way as to give it a viewing angle of the locks and seals.”

  Koffield felt a trifle foolish as he sp
oke, and as he locked the travel case in the secured container, took the camera from Marquez, and attached it to the container. Once he had seen a small-town sleight-of-hand artist who took so long explaining his trick in such detail that the stunt itself was a letdown. Had it been worth all that rigmarole just to establish that the data in the suitcase was authentic, and did indeed come from the last century?

  Possibly. He wouldn’t know until he got a good look at Solace. Until he did get a look, he could at least hope that he was wrong, and that he had just wasted Marquez’s time, and his own.

  The secured container was designed to hold a standard longwatch camera on a special projecting clamp, and it didn’t take long for Koffield to put the travel case in it, seal the container, and set up the camera. “All done, Captain. Thank you for your help.”

  “Wait a second,” Marquez said. “You did a forecast of how their terraforming turned out? On Solace?”

  Koffield felt a brief moment of satisfaction that Captain Marquez was quick to spot the one fact at the center of it all, the thing Koffield was trying to protect against any accusation of fraud or trickery. “That’s right,” Koffield said. “That’s part of it. A big part of it. I was coming here to warn them about what I thought was going to happen. Is there some sort of safe or lockdown in the control center, Captain? I’d like to lock this case away.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Marquez said. “There’s a small safe in the watch officer’s cabin. But the ah, whatever it is—you figure it’s happened by now?”

  “Yes,” Koffield said. “Unless my figures were utterly, totally wrong, it’s happened by now. I’d like to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.”

  “And you’ve done all this to prove you did the work a hundred twenty-seven years ago, and didn’t fake it up some way. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Marquez frowned and nodded thoughtfully, then shook his head. “But I don’t get it. If you’re right about—about whatever it was—and it’s already happened, it’s too late. It doesn’t matter, one way or another. Either you were right or wrong. Did we just go through all that recording nonsense so you could prove how smart you are if it turns out you were right?”

  Koffield smiled without pleasure and shook his head. “No,” he said. “My ego’s not quite that big. I had a better, if grimmer, reason for playing games with seals and locks and cameras.”

  “What reason?” Marquez demanded;

  Koffield had to say something, had to let Marquez know that his guesses were right, at least as far as they went—if for no other reason than to keep Marquez from getting too curious and to keep him from looking for answers on his own. Marquez deserved to know the whole truth. But the truth was bad enough that Koffield could not bring himself to tell it yet. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he had made some blessed mistake. No. Leave the detailed explanations until they were absolutely necessary. “If my calculations are correct,” Koffield said, “and if I can prove that I made them before—things happened— then maybe that will serve as proof that my techniques are valid.” He bent over to pick up the secured container. “And then maybe they will listen to me when I warn them about what’s going to happen next.”

  CHAPTER NINE Arrivals

  Marquez settled himself down in the navigator’s station and gestured for Koffield to sit next to him, at the nav assistant’s station. Better that than having the man standing behind him, breathing down his neck. Marquez felt edgy enough as it was without the added subconscious distraction of worrying about whoever Was behind him.

  The first step was to bring the ship broadside to her direction of travel. The long slender cylinder of the Dom Pedro IV was currently pointed straight through her direction of travel. Marquez swung the ship around ninety degrees, so that she was flying sideways. That allowed him to bring the aft sensor clusters and side sensor clusters to bear on the planet as well, and made it possible to use interferometry and other multiple-aperture enhancement tricks.

  He checked over the control settings one last time, and satisfied himself that the detector and imaging systems were ready.

  He activated the forward and aft long-range cameras, slaved the aft cameras to the forward cameras, and set the system to track on the image of the planet. He threw the visual image up on the main nav display and set it for maximum magnification. He was rewarded with a blurry, indistinct blob centered in the main display.

  “Is that the best we can do?” Koffield asked. “Are we too far out to get a better image?”

  “Give it a minute,” Marquez said. “Maybe my gear isn’t as fast or fancy as Chronologic Patrol hardware, but it works.” He brought the enhancers on-line, activated the image-vibration compensators, and told the image processors to use the interferometry data to sharpen the image. The enhancement software needed a few seconds of baseline imagery data to work with before it could do any compensation or correction. It ran the cleanup through several iterations, each a slight improvement over the last.

  The image of the planet shimmered down from a blur to a fuzzy ball. There was a pause, then the fuzzy ball became a reasonably clear image; another pause, and then another transformation as the clear image turned sharp as a razor’s edge.

  The subprocessors were already at work, their results popping up on the smaller displays below the main viewer. The cartographic systems locked in on visible land formations, did pattern-matching against the maps in the DP-IV’s computer system, and threw a latitude-and-longitude grid over the image of the world. The atmospheric analyzers began their spectroscopic studies and density columns and cloud-cover analyses. The thermal mappers began their work as well, developing a heat model for the planetary surface. The DP-JV’s data-integration system went to work with all the new datapoints, throwing up endless screen-fuls of derived information about the planet Solace. Atmospheric composition and density. Estimated extent and depth of ice caps. Shifts in land usage since archived mapping scan. But Marquez didn’t need to look at any of that. All he needed to see was the image of the planet itself, centered there in the main viewscreen. The view inspired him to a string of eloquent, despairing curses. Everything Koffield had said and done had warned Marquez that it might be bad. But he had never expected it to be this bad.

  They were looking down upon the wreckage of a world. Even from here, viewing the planet at long range from the edge of the planetary system, the ruin of Solace was plain to see. This was no living world, but a dying one.

  Humanity had found no living worlds at all, besides Earth herself. All the other inhabitated worlds had been made, terraformed. All the new-made worlds had been created by humanity in some variant of Earth’s own image and so shared a strong family resemblance. They were blue and white and green, the view of their surfaces artfully dimmed and obscured by the intervening cloudscape and their oxygen-thick atmospheres.

  A lifeless world might look like anything. It might be a vacuum-locked place of hard edges, sharp craters, and cruel mountains, a world devoid of color or softness. It might be a banded gas giant painted in the gaudiest of hues. It might be a featureless monochromatic ball of lurid green or sickly yellow or sullen red.

  But Solace looked like none of those.

  Marquez had seen many worlds in trouble. Humanity had attempted to terraform nearly a hundred worlds, all told, and many of them had failed, in whole or in part. Terraforms on the edge of failure all looked the same. And the planet framed in the telescope view looked like every one of them.

  He could see where the blue ocean waters had turned algae-green in one spot as the microorganisms bloomed out of control, then on to death-brown in another as the algae died, once they had consumed all the nutrients. He knew without examining the datafields that the glare-white of the ice caps was gleaming too bright, and had swelled too large, as the ice crept forward from the poles toward the equator. He knew the planetary cloud cover was being frozen and boiled away as the temperatures went to extremes, driving the water vapor out of the atmosphere.


  Koffield was right. Solace was in bad trouble.

  He turned away from the screen toward Admiral Koffield.

  “Is it as bad as you thought it would be?” he asked him. “Or better? Or worse?”

  Koffield was unable to tear his eyes away from the displays. His eyes flitted from the main viewer to the subdis-plays, to the imagery, to the charts and graphs and tables of data.

  “Admiral Koffield?”

  “Hmm?” Koffield blinked and looked toward Marquez.

  “Oh. Yes. Sorry.” He let out a weary sigh. “Very much as I expected, I’m afraid. We’re just getting rough data here, of course, and obviously I don’t have access to my data or my models, but yes. This is what my research predicted.”

  Marquez looked back toward the main screen. He thought back to the last time he had been to Solace, and the time before that. How long had it been, in his own personal bio-chron time? How much time had passed in his life then? Six years since that visit, nine or ten since the one before that? How could so much have happened to the planet in that short a space of time? But then he remembered.

  The centuries and the light-years had come back at him, with all the sharp suddenness of a slap in the face. Since he had last been here, millions had lived out their whole lives. Species had been created in the lab, then gone extinct in the wild, while he had sat in his temporal-confinement chamber.

  Time had gone past, and he was part of that past. ‘ He forced such thoughts from himself. There was too much else to do, too many decisions to make. Standard system-arrival procedure said they should send a hail to Solace Central Orbital Station, assuming it was still there. But it might not be wise to advertise the presence of the DP-IV just yet. Not until they knew a lot more. “Now what do we do?” he asked Koffield. In theory, and indeed in practice, as captain he was the absolute master of the Dom Pedro IV. But he would be a fool not to seek advice from such a source as Koffield, at such a time as this.