The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Did you have to have a personality like that, Marquez wondered, before you were capable of destroying a wormhole and a convoy of ships, a wormhole that was a vital link between a half-wrecked world and the outside universe? Before you could sign a planet’s death warrant in defense of something as unsubstantial as that holy of holies, Causality with a capital C?

  Koffield double-checked his control settings then nodded to himself, satisfied with his own work. “That should get us started,” he said. “I’ve set it to locate and monitor all the public broadcast channels it can find, and record both the raw results and summaries of what it finds. We can leave it running now, and we should have some sort of results by morning.”

  Marquez didn’t bother to point out that it was his ship, and he could see how Koffield had set things without being told. “Very good,” said Felipe Henrique Marquez as he stood up, forcing himself to be civil. “Then let’s .get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

  Koffield stood as well and looked Marquez in the eye. There was something in Koffield’s expression that made Marquez feel as if the man could see straight into him and know all that he wished to keep hidden. But Koffield merely smiled. “A good night’s sleep tonight,” he agreed. “Things ought to seem a bit more settled tomorrow. We’ll try and have a day with no surprises.”

  Marquez chuckled to himself. Koffield cocked his head quizzically, clearly wondering what was funny. But Marquez granted himself the small luxury of not explaining. No surprises. If Rear Admiral Anton Koffield could arrange, by sheer force of his quiet, determined personality, for there to be no more surprises—well, on that matter, at least, Admiral Koffield would meet with no resistance at all from Marquez.

  CHAPTER TEN Awakened by Death

  Her body was not her own. Someone or something else had grabbed it away from her, torn it from her grasp. Demons were forcing it to leap and whirl, buck and sway, as they danced to hideous music that blared and moaned, screamed and gibbered, all about her.

  Norla Chandray, second officer of the Dom Pedro IV, woke up halfway through her nightmare—and realized that the nightmare was real.

  Long sleep. Cold sleep. Cryosleep. Hibernation. Whatever name you called it by, she had been in it, and she was coming out of it. The trainers at the merchant’s academy had warned her, over and over again, that it would be bad, that she would waken with no control over her own body, that she would waken in the midst of something very like an epileptic fit.

  But they could tell her anything they liked. It was nothing at all like doing it.

  It’s my first time, she protested to the gibbering demons, and to whatever other forces or powers that might be willing to intercede. It’s my first time. Can’t you go easy on me?

  Irrational, all of it, above and beyond the fact that she was trying to bargain with imaginary beings. Because all the training and medical people had told her the first time was the worst. Everyone had been more than eager to tell her that.

  Some small fraction of the population couldn’t handle the shock of revival and just plain died halfway through waking up. Others lived through it without any physical harm, but never recovered mentally from the ordeal. To hear some of the old hands tell it, there were nonreturn-ables loitering around every port city in Settled Space— people who had meant to make a round-trip on a timeshaft ship, but could not face another cryosleep revival, nor even bear to get back into a cryo canister. Rather than face it, they spent the rest of their lives stranded light-years from home, watching the shuttles lifting for orbit, never daring to board one.

  Her legs jerked back and forth and her stomach muscles spasmed violently. Is that going to be me? she wondered. Am I going to be a nonreturnablef

  “Easy now,” said a man’s voice, an older man’s voice, speaking in gentle, calming tones. “This is no fun, I know. I did it yesterday. We had a slight problem reviving you, and it’s not over yet, but you should be all right.”

  Norla blinked and cleared her vision—or at least tried to do so. Neither her eyes nor her eyelids seemed to be working properly yet. She could make out a faint man-shaped blur standing over her, but that was all.

  Norla tried to speak, but her voice was so garbled she couldn’t even understand herself. What’s all the noise, she tried to ask. It came out as something like “Wuz—wuz guggle naz?”

  It was not until she heard herself asking the question that the conscious part of her mind even realized the screaming from her dreams was still happening, and apparently quite real.

  “I have to go,” the voice said, calm and yet hurried. “Someone else needs—needs—never mind. I’m going to give you an injection, a neural stimulant. Your body isn’t reviving quite as fast as it should. There’s nothing all that dangerous in slow revival, but it’s best to get it over with. The stimulant will help you recover faster. The spasming is going to get worse, but it shouldn’t last too much longer. But we have to leave you strapped down until we’re sure the spasms have stopped. I’ll be back when—when I can.”

  “Bownt eav me. Pease bownt eav me!” Norla cried out,and this time she was in conscious—if imperfect—control of what she was saying. Just as she was about to open her mouth to try to speak again, a strong, gentle hand grasped her jaw and eased her mouth open. She felt something being put in her mouth, and firm, insistent, careful pressure on her jaw. “It’s just a bite guard,” the voice said. “To stop you biting your tongue off or cracking a tooth if the spasming gets too bad. I’m going to have to tape it in place.” She could see blurry movement and feel the adhesive tape being strapped down on her face. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” the voice said. Even in the state she was in, Norla couldn’t help wondering whether its owner wasn’t trying to reassure himself as much as her. That thought, all by itself, was terrifying.

  But there was nothing she could do. She felt the icy pinprick of a pressure injector on the base of her jaw, just under her left ear.

  But the voice and the man were already gone.

  Whatever the neural stimulator was,- it seemed to go to work fast. Suddenly her head cleared, and her mind felt sharp, alert. Her vision snapped into focus, and the ceiling over her head was no longer a muddle of fuzzy white, but instead a gridwork of sharply delineated panels. But the same stimulant seemed to encourage every muscle in her body to spasm and cramp even harder. Her stomach muscles clamped down so hard she thought she was about to crack a rib. Her legs and arms arched up against the restraints. Her breathing turned shallow and rapid.

  And the screaming went on and on.

  Screaming? It dawned on her fully for the first time that the horrible sound was outside of herself, and not some invention of her cryo-muddled head. She realized that she could hear others’ voices as well. Two men, talking in urgent tones, struggling to make themselves heard over the dreadful shrieking of a soul in mortal agony. The calm, urgent voice of the man who had spoken to her, and another voice, deeper and more guttural, more emotional. She could hear nothing but snatches of their words to each other.

  “—out of control—”

  “Hold him dow straint is coming loose—”

  “What’s gone wro”

  “Hold him! Hold him!”

  “The spasming is getting—”

  “Lord’s sake! Hold him!

  “He’s going into sho—”

  The screaming grew louder, drowning out all other sound for long seconds. Then came a loud, sharp banging noise, of something hard slamming into a solid surface again and again and again, the screams cutting off with every bang before starting up again.

  “His head’s loose of the restraint!”

  “He’s going to smash his brain out!”

  “Hold it down before he breaks his—”

  And with the hideous, sickening snap of breaking bones, the screaming stopped again, this time forever.

  Norla wanted to scream herself, scream and run away, to tear the bite guard from her mouth and the restraints from her body and run, run as far a
s could be from that hideous noise, and the horrible after-silence that was somehow louder than any scream.

  But the bite guard stayed in, and the restraint held, and she could feel the neural stimulant digging in and taking hold. Her mind sharpened along with her fear. Will that be me? she asked herself. Will I be next? She was suddenly aware of sweat pouring out of her body, of her forehead damp with perspiration and her eyes blinking back the stinging salt of tears and sweat commingled. She felt as if she were burning up. The ceiling was looming in closer, and sounds took on a strange and eerie timbre. Just the stimulant, she told herself. Just side effects of the stimulant. At least that’s what she hoped.

  But then the spasms took hold of her again, with greater cruelty and violence and pain than before, hitting so hard that fear of her senses betraying her, fear of death itself, seemed trivial by comparison.

  Her body was not her own. Trussed up and tied down, her body awash with revival drugs and cryosleep reaction, there was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do.

  With a muffled sound that could have been a sob, or a moan, or a prayer, she gave herself up to it all’.

  “You gave us a scare,” the voice announced out of the soothing darkness.

  It took a moment for it to sink in, but then Norla came to herself enough to realize she was awake, and alive. She reached up her hand to her face—and nearly slapped herself, her long-unused muscles and reflexes still not quite all the way back to normal. Moving her hand and fingers with slightly exaggerated care, she touched her face, her jaw, her mouth. She could feel the tender places where the bite guard had been taped down, and sense the ache in her jaw and the roof of her mouth from when her jaw had clamped shut and stayed that way for minutes—or seconds, or hours—on end. “I was pretty scared myself,” she said.

  “You had every right to be,” the man’s voice said.

  Norla realized that she had yet to open her eyes, and wondered for a moment why she hadn’t. What was she scared to see that could be worse than what had just happened?

  She forced her eyelids apart. Discovering nothing more terrifying than the painted-metal ceiling of a ship’s cabin, she sat up halfway in bed, bracing herself on one elbow. She winced as a half dozen sets of muscles protested. Her body was a mass of twinges and tender spots and sore muscles, as if she had being doing hard exercise all the day before. But such slight pains were as nothing at the moment. There was something welcome and comforting about a sensation as normal as feeling stiff and tired. It was a commonplace, everyday sort of sensation, one her body recognized and knew how. to deal with.

  She had made it.

  “Is it always that bad?” she asked. Is that what I’ll have to go through with every revival? Can I be a timeshaft flier and get into a cryocan if I know I’m going to wake up in hell at the end of every trip?

  “No, praise the stars,” the man said. “It’s rare. Very rare.

  But it was bad for everyone this time. I’ve done enough time drops to build up a fair amount of resistance. Even so, I had a pretty rough ride—though nothing like yours.”

  “You’re the paying passenger,” she said, apropos of nothing. “You’re Admiral Koffield.”

  “That’s right,” he said, a faint smile on his gentle face.

  “Someone else died during revival,” Norla said. “I heard it happen,” she added, to make it clear it was not a question, and to make it clear she was recovered enough to be told the truth.

  Koffield looked her right in the eye, long enough that she started to wonder just how ready for the truth she was. Then, at last, he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “Two died, actually. Sub-Officer Yacobs, the one you heard, was the second. Sub-Officer Lastiz died first. The usual mortality rate is under one in five hundred. We don’t know why there were two dead, or why the revivals were so rough on all of us. It might just be bad luck, or maybe there was a malfunction. We don’t know yet.”

  Yacobs and Lastiz, Norla thought. Just hours before they stepped into the cryocans, the three of them had been laughing and joking about how the first-timers had to stick together. The three of them had gone through cryo-orientation at the same time, and spent endless hours in each other’s company. Joah Yacobs had been so excited over the idea of his first interstellar trip, so proud to have passed all the tests so young. Zara Lastiz had been proud and excited as well, of course, but she had worked hard to keep it hidden. She was a great believer in self-control. Both Joah and Zara had earned their starfarer’s rating before their twenty-first standard birthday. Norla was ten years older than Joah and Zara, just old enough for her to find herself playing mother hen to them now and then. Unconsciously she had taken it upon herself to look after them, and unconsciously they had accepted it.

  And now they were gone, past care, past everything.

  She looked up at the kindly face that watched her. Koffield had to know. From what she knew of the man, Koffield was not likely to be a man who acted without preparation, or spoke without knowing the facts. He knew that something had killed not just two victims at random. It had killed two first-timers and nearly killed the third. He knew they had all been friends. He knew he was telling her she was alone, and that the wings of the angel of death had brushed close to her.

  But she could not believe he would tell her such things so soon after the fact, when she was scarcely out of shock, unless—unless she had to know such things right away, know everything about the situation right away. Unless they were in trouble so deep that they didn’t have the luxury of time enough to worry over the sensibilities of someone who had nearly died in the act of waking. “We’re in trouble,” she said. “Something bad has happened, something very bad.”

  Koffield raised one eyebrow slightly and allowed one corner of his mouth to move in the direction of a smile. “You’re not slow getting off the mark, are you?”

  “I’m right?”

  Koffield nodded reluctantly. “Quite right. Captain Marquez is going to brief the crew in about twenty minutes’ time.”

  “Then I’d better get up,” Norla said. She sat up completely in bed, then swung her feet around and planted them on the deck. Just that simple act was enough to set her head reeling and put black spots before her eyes. She grabbed the edge of the bunk with both hands, as hard as she could, and braced herself up.

  Koffield watched her carefully, but made no move to help her. That all by itself sent a clear message. We’re in an emergency situation, Koffield was saying, just by sitting there, hands folded. We can’t spare the time and energy right now seeing after invalids who shouldn’t be out of bed in the first place. There’s no sense encouraging you if you can’t manage on your own. “Do you think you’ll be in good enough shape to attend the meeting?” he asked. The words he spoke were gentler than the message Norla imagined, but the intent was the same.

  Norla sat there for a moment, trying to get her head to clear. She could not, would not, let her first act after revival be a decision to give up without a fight. “No,” she said at last. “But I’m going to be there anyway.”

  “That about sums it up,” Marquez said, switching off the last of the display devices. “Beyond saying that I will conduct a memorial service for our fallen comrades in two hours, there is little else left to report. Now you know as much as I do about our situation. For reasons I cannot explain, we’re where we’re supposed to be, but over a century late. And, just to be absolutely clear, there’s no going back. The Chronologic Patrol would blow us out of the sky if we went near the uptime end of a timeshaft and tried to head downtime.”

  The main table in the wardroom was round, with just enough room about it to accommodate the full crew of the Dom Pedro IV. But two members of the crew were back in their cryocans, dead, in storage, until Marquez could figure out what to do with them. No one seemed pleased about the extra elbow room.

  Marquez considered the faces about the table. Koffield sat directly opposite him; Norla Chandray, the one who had nearly been their third fatality, sitting
on Koffield’s right. The rest of the crew, all twelve of them, took up the remaining seats. Thirteen crew and Koffield—and he knew most of the crew no better than he knew Koffield. That could be a problem. Timeshaft crew tended to be freelancers, signing on for one or two voyages at a time, rather than remaining with one ship for years on end. It was not unusual for a timeshaft ship to have some of her crew recruited at the last minute. But there were only three in this crew Marquez had ever shipped out with before, and he had done so only once with each.

  Well, they were stuck with each other now. The Dom Pedro IV was a century out-of-date. Would he, Marquez, even be able to find the command center on a modern ship?

  One of the crew—Smillers, that was the name—raised his hand. “Yes, Smillers, what is it?”

  “Sir, beg your pardon, but how the hell did this happen?”

  “We don’t know,” Marquez said, and looked at all the other faces around the table. “Why didn’t we enter the wormhole or even fly toward it? Why didn’t my temporal-confinement field shut down when it was supposed to? Why did the clocks zero out? How did we get to our destination at all, instead of sailing past into space? Why was cryogenic revival so bad for everyone? Why did cryogenic revival kill two people? I can give you the same answer to all of them—we don’t know.”

  “Sir?”

  Marquez turned toward the new speaker. He was a young man Marquez knew only slightly. Normally cheerful, he looked as worried as everyone else did at the moment. Dixon Phelby, the cargo specialist. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I think I can help out with part of the last, sir,” said Phelby. “I’ve shipped a couple of times on big colonist-transport ships, sir. Four times the size of this ship, and no cargo holds—just cryostorage for humans and animals. They might fly with three or four thousand passengers. They don’t even use individual cryo canisters on those ships. They just put a hundred people in one big chamber, and freeze the whole compartment. They do it wholesale. Forty or fifty multicans like that per ship.”