The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “I don’t know,” Koffield said. “You and I both need time to think.” He smiled grimly. “We’ve lost so much time already it can’t do any harm to spend a little more.”

  “One thing I know for sure,” Marquez said. “We don’t let them”—he stabbed a finger at the image of Solace— “know we’re here until we know more. Places in as bad a shape as that aren’t always the healthiest places to visit.”

  “You’re right as far as that goes,” Koffield said. “At the very least, we should listen in on whatever radio traffic we can pick up.”

  “But before we start in on that,” Marquez said, “I’m going to put on the brakes and slow us down. Until we know more, and we decide what to do, let’s stay out here, where it’s nice and dark and lonely and no one’s going to notice us.”

  “Do it,” Koffield said. “Let’s park this ship right where she is until we’ve had a good long look at the situation.”

  “Right,” said Marquez. “And as soon as we’ve done the braking burn, you’re going to help me get the rest of the crew revived.”

  He gestured once more toward the image of Solace on the screen and shook his head mournfully. “That’s one dark mess out there,” he said. “We’re going to need all the help we can get finding out about it.”

  Neshobe Kalzant knelt in the sparse shade of the brown and dying trees and scooped up a handful of the near-lifeless soil. She ignored the cockroaches that scuttled over her hand and dropped away, back onto the ground. The roaches were everywhere, after all. Any squeamishness she felt about them had long since been worn away. What disturbed her far more than the live roaches were the corpses of the dead ones. It was hard to pick up a handful of earth that did not contain at least a few of them.

  “It looks extremely bad,” she said, standing up, the handful of the dried-out soil still in her hand. The country residence of the Planetary Executive shouldn’t be in this bad a shape. No place on the planet should be in this bad a shape. What was it like in places where they didn’t try to coddle and cosset the plant life? She looked toward her companion. “How bad is it?”

  “I assume you want to know about the report on the overall climate and not about conditions here in your own garden,” Parrige said.

  Neshobe allowed herself a small smile. “Both, actually. You’re a real gardener. I could obviously use some advice.”

  “My first piece of advice would be to fire whoever is looking after the place,” Parrige said, looking around unhappily. “Plainly that person is not doing a good job.”

  Neshobe laughed sadly. “Are you talking about the gardener in charge of this estate or the politician in charge of the planet?”

  Parrige stiffened for a moment, then shook his head. “I was of course referring to the gardener, Madam. But it occurs to me that he might well be in the same position as the politician—as yourself, ma’am. Relatively new in the job, and having inherited a disastrous situation.”

  “Quite diplomatic,” she said. “But what of the commission report?” she asked. “What will it say?”

  “That the underlying ecostructure is in worse shape than it looks, in some ways, and better than it seems in others. However, how things are now is almost immaterial. It is the direction of the trend line that is worrisome, not our present position on that line.”

  Neshobe looked up at Parrige. Such a dignified, serious man. Put him in a plain brown robe and a skullcap, and he would be the perfect archetype for—for—what the devil was the name? Monk, or friar, or pope. Something like that. Whatever name it was the near ancients had given to their religious isolates, Parrige looked the part.

  But Parrige was dressed in a sensible white tunic and an entirely conventional, even conservative, pair of full-length trousers. No knee breeches for him, no matter what fashion dictated. Parrige was what he was, and he wore what he wore, and he did not care what the world thought of him. Neshobe envied him that.

  “In other words, your commissioners are past caring if it’s bad now. The problem is that it’s getting worse.” She looked around herself at the parched landscape. Bone dry, all of it. Solace City Spaceport, the scene of the hell-storm rain and riot not so long ago, was only two thousand kilometers to the east. Why in chaos couldn’t they tempt some of the endless Solace City rain to this place, where it might actually do some good? “It is still getting worse, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. The ecostructure is collapsing at a faster and faster rate. The commission will recommend that we now divert all the resources directed at renewing and reviving the ecosystem toward an effort to conserve what remains. Given such a redirection of resources, the commission planning staff thinks we can stabilize the situation in the short term, but—”

  “Stabilize it?” she asked, holding up her handful of dead soil. “What’s the point of that, when even the cockroaches are starving to death? If all we do is stabilize the situation, sooner or later we all die.”

  There was a moment of eloquent silence. Her companion needed to say nothing at all in order to make a full response. Neshobe sighed wearily, dropped her handful of soil, wiped each hand on the other, and then stood up. She began to walk back toward the main house, Parrige falling into step beside her. “I know,” she said. “In the long run, we’re all dead. And I suppose if repairing the planetary climate is not currently possible, stabilization at least buys us time. Go on with what you were saying, Parrige.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You are quite right—judged on any long-term time scale, mere stabilization is futile. The planet, in its current state, cannot permanently support human life. And renewing the ecostructure is beyond our current capacity. Propping it up, trying to get it to hold together a while longer, is all we can do. Doing so could buy us enough time until we have greater resources and can work toward actual recovery. That, in sum, is the view of the commission.”

  Neshobe looked to Parrige, and then back down at the dying soil, and the wretched insects scuttling about on it. Humanity had made a mess of this world. Humanity had to at least try to set things right.

  There was a low bench at the side of the path. Once it had stood in the shade of an elm tree, but now the tree was dead. Its trunk had been snapped in half about two meters off the ground, no doubt the work of some windstorm or another. Some termites had found enough water to survive and they were at work on it now, by the looks of it. The exposed wood was riddled with boreholes and looked soft and crumbly. There were puddles of sawdust nestled here and there at the base of the tree.

  Neshobe sat down on the bench and looked back the way they had come. Once upon a time, there had been a fine view from this vantage point. Back in her predecessor’s time, it had no doubt been quite pleasant to sit in this place and admire the rolling hills of lush green meadow and the small stands of trees, the blue-purple skies of Solace and the dramatic banks of clouds that rolled across them. But now the green was brown, and the parched sky was grey with dust and robbed of its clouds, and all was dead or dying.

  It was quiet enough that Neshobe fancied she could hear the termites gnawing at the vitals of the dead tree, even if she could not see them.

  But no, that was only her imagination. There was nothing of the termites themselves that she could hear or see. There was no sound. The planet’s enemies were like that too—invisible, all but undetectable, but unquestionably there, and unquestionably impossible to root out, because they had burrowed their way too deep into the life they were destroying.

  What were humans to this planet? Were they cockroaches, unwholesome interlopers, with individuals struggling to survive, but the species itself perfectly capable of adapting and surviving? Or were humans the termites here, still gnawing on the corpse of this world long after they had killed the body?

  We are neither, she silently told herself, as forcefully as she could. We are not noisome scavengers or murderous parasites. We tried to plant a garden, tried to bring life to a world, and failed. Surely that is not the same as killing the world out
right.

  She forced her mind back to the issues at hand and looked back toward Parrige. “All right,” she said. “We’ll refocus our efforts on stabilization. But not exclusively. If we concern ourselves solely with the short term, we’re not going to have a long term. I want people working on how we can develop the industrial capacity, and especially bioindustrial capacity, so we can go back over to the offensive. I want to rebuild Solace, not just keep more of it from falling to pieces.”

  “You bring us back to Greenhouse, then,” Parrige said.

  “Exactly. We’ve settled for a stabilized decline there for entirely too long. I don’t think we’d be in as bad a shape as we are now if it had been maintained properly. We need it revived, upgraded, better than it ever was.”

  “That may be impossible,” Parrige replied. “It would require a new SunSpot, and igniting a new SunSpot would produce a pulse of radiation powerful enough to kill everything on Greenhouse—and wouldn’t do the living things in the rest of the planetary system a great deal of good either.”

  “Then we find another way,” Neshobe said. “Otherwise, when the current SunSpot finally gives out, Greenhouse dies. And if Greenhouse dies—”

  “Yes, ma’am. Then there will be no hope for reviving Solace. At best we’ll be left with the planet as it is.”

  Neshobe nodded and stood up again. “Time to get back,” she said, and starting walking briskly toward the house, not waiting for Parrige to fall into step with her. No point in continuing the conversation further. If the best-case scenario was a Solace no better than the half-dead corpse that now existed—if that was the best they could do, well, then, perhaps there was no point in talking at all.

  The engines of the Dom Pedro IV throttled down to zero. Marquez checked the system-status boards one last time, then unstrapped himself from the pilot’s station. The braking maneuver was done. Marquez hadn’t even bothered with more than a first-approximation calculation of what orbit he wanted to achieve. He had simply swung the ship around so the DP-IV was traveling stern first, thus aiming the engines through her direction of travel. Then he had fired the engine until the ship was at a dead stop, relative to the planet and the inner system of Solace.

  Of course, the ship would be pulled in toward the inner Solacian star system by the star’s gravity, and start falling in once again. It would be a leisurely fall, requiring hundreds of years to complete. They would change course again long before then.

  In effect, he was allowing the ship to drift for the moment. So far as Marquez was concerned, their present position, course, and heading were not matters of particular import. Later, when they had actually decided where they wanted to go, and how soon they wanted to get there, he would take more care in setting his course.

  But there was something else about the ship’s flight path tickling at the back of his mind. However she had ended up on her original course, she had been placed on it with almost preternatural precision, aimed for a perfect intercept with Solace. The odds against that happening by chance were remote enough that they might as well be zero.

  That was part of why he had done the braking burn in such a slapdash manner. If their situation had been manipulated in some way, it was, he felt it prudent to move the ship off that course in an unplanned, near-random way. He did not wish to appear predicable.

  In any event, with the braking burn over, it was time to turn his attention to the other jobs that needed doing. They had a lot of work ahead of them—not all of it particularly pleasant.

  Marquez made his way over to the comm officer’s station. Koffield was there, slowly and carefully working to disarm the lockouts on the various comm systems. As was the case on every timeshaft ship, the Artlnts that controlled the DP-JV’s comm systems, along with the comm units themselves, had been designed and installed by the Chronologic Patrol. They were designed to prevent any infraction of the Patrol’s complex laws against unauthorized communication from the future to the past.

  The comm units had a well-deserved reputation for being prickly customers, suspicious of any human operator. If, for whatever, reason, the sealed system did not like the situation, or got it into its mind that there was some sort of attempt at illicit communication going on, it was capable of self-destructing—using a built-in explosive powerful enough to destroy the whole ship. Marquez, therefore, had been more than willing to take Koffield up on his offer to dicker with the comm unit.

  In theory, the system was designed with enough flexibility to deal with emergencies and unforeseen situations-such as the DP-IVs present plight. But the whole system was so heavily encrypted and festooned about with fail-safes and fire walls that Marquez always felt it was something close to a miracle if a ship actually managed to send a message without getting shot down or blown up.

  “How is it going?” Marquez asked as he sat down beside Koffield.

  “Reasonably well, for a wonder,” Koffield replied. “The comm system seems as shocked as we are about how much time has passed. It seems to have had its internal clock zeroed out as well. But once it got a look at the positional data for the Solace system, it was ready to believe. I think it helps a lot that I’m a Chronologic Patrol officer. It was a lot more ready to listen to me once it heard a few recognition codes and scanned my retina.”

  “Is it going to unlock the system for us?”

  Koffield nodded wearily, and yawned. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s been a long, hard day. But I think the comm system will unlock for us. After all, it’s programmed to keep us from going into the past and communicating information from the future. It isn’t programmed to care if we work it in the other direction. The situation we’re in is strange enough that the comm unit suspects it might be a trick of some sort. But I think I’ve offered it a compromise it can accept. It’s been gaming my offer for the last few minutes, doing decision trees and running down all the permutations. I’m not sure how long it will take to work enough scenarios to be satisfied.”

  Marquez raised his eyebrows. He knew perfectly well how long that sort of processing could take. Taken to and past its logical extreme, that sort of open-ended analysis could wind up doing estimates on the time remaining until the heat death of the universe, or projected changes in the statistical distribution of atomic particles throughout the universe. Comm units had a reputation for paranoid thoroughness. They’d just have to hope this comm was prepared to be reasonable. “What’s the deal you offered?” he asked.

  “I doubt you’ll like it much. The comm system lets us in, but in exchange it wants to do a total, irrevocable lockdown on communication on any time-hack earlier than the present here-now.”

  Marquez frowned. Logically, he had no reason to object. He knew damned well they were never going to be able to return to their own time. It wasn’t giving up much to give up the chance to communicate with a past he could not go back to. But interstellar travel was not always absolutely precise. Timeshaft ships often arrived at their destinations a matter of a few days or weeks, or even months, downtime from when they had started. A ship might arrive in its own past, albeit tens or hundreds of light-years away from where it had experienced that past. A ship in that situation was expected to sit tight and wait until time caught up with her before communicating, but was allowed to call for help in an emergency. Koffield wanted to bargain that ability away. “I hope you were going to check with me before finalizing that with the comm unit,” Marquez said. “This is still my ship.”

  “Yes, I know,” Koffield replied, and rubbed his eyes with a weary hand. “I was going to. I should have cleared it with you before I made the offer in the first place. I’m getting a little punchy.”

  “We’re both tired,” Marquez said. “It’s been a hell of a day for us both.”

  “It has,” Koffield said. “Shall I withdraw the offer?”

  Marquez thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s a sensible deal. Once I had a chance to think it all through, I probably would have offered the com
m unit something like that myself. I suppose I was just a bit thrown by being reminded that we’re not going home, not ever. Besides, if you tried to cancel the deal now, you’d only make the comm Artlnt even more suspicious.”

  “All right, then,” Koffield said. “We’ll let it go.” He reached for the control panel and entered new commands into the system.

  An overhead screen came to life.

  Comm unit hereby accepts Admiral Koffield’s bargain, it read. Comm unit will fully release control of communications during present period in Solacian system in exchange for total lockdown of all communications at any time in the local here-now past. Comm unit will initiate this agreement upon confirmation from Admiral Koffield and Captain Marquez.

  Koffield looked toward Marquez with a wry smile. “It looks like your comm unit wouldn’t go along without your okay anyway,” he said.

  “So it seems,” Marquez replied. Not for the first time, Koffield had put him just a trifle off stride, seemingly without trying, without even being aware of it.

  “So it’s all right?” Koffield asked.

  “Hmm?” Marquez looked up. “What? Yes. Comm unit—this is Marquez. I concur.”

  “This is Koffield. I concur as well.”

  A new message popped up on the screen. Agreement implemented. No communication will be permitted prior to the present recorded time. Full communications system released for use during present period in Solacian star system.

  The comm board’s manual controls came to life, and Koffield set to work as Marquez watched him.

  The man had a way of moving ahead, moving in, taking over, without ever seeming anything other than quiet, urbane, courteous. It seemed as if the choices he offered were never truly choices at all. At the end of it all, there was never more than just the simple, sensible way forward that he put right in front of you. Somehow, what he wanted was always reasonable, and the options never were.