The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “My superiors knew, and I knew, that, after Circum Central, I could no longer hold a command. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. Because sooner or later someone important and official would throw a drink in my face. Or some Glistern with thoughts of revenge would make a try for me with a pistol or a knife and get himself killed by my security detachment—or try it with a suicide bomb attack and get a few hundred innocent bystanders killed. Or maybe there would be something as trivial as a crude, loud, abusive drunk cursing me at a party. Even something as minor as that could develop into a very bad situation if it happened in the wrong time and place.

  “Wherever I went, whatever I did, whatever orders I was given, Circum Central and the collapse of Glister would be there, getting between me and whatever job I was supposed to do.”

  “So what did they do?”

  “So they gave me a medal and made speeches they seemed to be embarrassed to be making, at a public ceremony that was kept very quiet and held where no one could get to it. And then they took me off the operational-assignment list and set to work finding a job for me that would keep me busy, and keep me quiet, until the worst of it blew over.”

  Koffield shrugged. “They put me on a shelf. And I stayed there until Oskar DeSilvo reached up and took me down from it.”

  Norla was duly impressed. “You met Oskar DeSilvo?”

  Koffield laughed, with more bitterness than humor. “Yes,” he said. “Oskar DeSilvo. The great man himself.” He walked to the wardroom porthole and looked out. The planet Solace was visible, a tiny blue, green, and brown ball hanging in the darkness. “The man who built Solace. Who made it what it is. Made it all that it is, for better or worse.”

  Anton Koffield turned from the porthole and looked at Norla. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. “There’s something I want to get. Something I’d like to show you.”

  With that, he walked into his cabin and shut the door behind him. Norla shrugged. Even when he was explaining things, the man didn’t give much away. Patience was quite a valuable virtue when dealing with Anton Koffield.

  She stood up to look out the porthole. There was Solace, drawing closer. With a little luck, they’d be docked at Solace Central Orbital Station in another day or so. Or was SCO Station there anymore? It almost didn’t matter. There would be some sort of station, and they’d dock with it, and arrange for passage down to the surface. Norla would get to see her first terraformed world.

  Though, judging by the way Koffield spoke, she didn’t get the sense it was going to be much worth looking at.

  CHAPTER TWELVE World Enough and Time

  It was coming on toward night, and a group of refugees, all of them men, had decided to head out of Ring Park and stretch their legs out on the Long Boulevard of Solace Central Orbital Station. Zak and some 6f the others came by Elber’s campsite and urged him to come along.

  Elber would have preferred to remain in the camp in Ring Park with his wife, Jassa, and their baby daughter, Zari. Elber was reluctant to leave Jassa on her own. She still grieved over the death of their son, little Belrad, who had died the year before. He was buried in the now-flooded fields of their farm, out behind their snug little house, back on Solace. Grave, house, farm—all of it was washed away now, lost in the floods and the endless rains.

  But Jassa had urged him to go out with the other men. “Get out of the camp for a while,” she told him, sitting by their tiny fire in the chill, cavernous darkness of Ring Park. “It drives you mad, just sitting around night after night with nothing to occupy your mind. Go. Try and enjoy yourself.”

  Maybe, he decided, it would do her some good if he could get his mind off his own troubles. He knew it broke her heart to watch him brooding, night after night. So he had followed along with Zak and the others, hanging back just a bit as the group set out for the Park exit.

  Three or four of the louder and more boisterous ones were passing a bottle they had gotten from somewhere and trying to get the rest of the group to join in a song, a bawdy old ballad about drinking and farm girls who were no better than they ought to be. Zak was singing loudest of all.

  Nearly everyone else joined in at the chorus, as they came up toward the exit from the Park, but Elber couldn’t bring himself to sing. He didn’t care for that sort of song, and he wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of leaving Ring Park so late in the evening. There had been trouble already, and there was bound to be trouble again.

  Elber had not met any of his fellow refugees before chance had thrown them all together in this strange space-station place. But that did not matter. He knew them all. They were all like him. Their story was his story. They had been farmers, and they had lived by an unspoken bargain with the upper-class, big-city, educated outside world. Take care of us, keep us safe, and we will do the farming and the hard work.

  But then the bad-weather times had come, and their farms and their fields had washed away, dried up, frozen, baked, or just plain died. They had looked to the government, the Senyors, the uppers, to take care of them, and got no useful help. With their farms destroyed, the dirt farmers had retreated to the cities, and found no welcome at all.

  Then had come the scares, the panics,’the riots, the rumor that the uppers were taking everyone off-planet. And, somehow, Elber and his family had gotten caught up in it, become part of a loose group of refugees who had decided to take the offer to get off the planet and out of the endless rain of Solace City.

  So now Elber Malloon and his family were refugees, swept up out of the rain, up into space, not quite sure how it had all happened, how they had decided to come to this strange place. He was, they all were, gluefeet, stuck in SCO Station, in space, no longer on the world of Solace at all. Instead they were in this weird, inside-outside place where walking in a straight line would as like as not turn out to be a circle that brought you right back to where you started. Lost and confused, Elber and his family, and all the other gluefeet, were hunkered down in Ring Park, the only place they were allowed to stay, up in the middle of the sky.

  It was hard to believe they were in space, off the world, but Elber had managed to catch a glimpse through one of the big viewports in Ring Park, before SCO Station security had posted guards around all the ‘ports. He had seen the world, the planet Solace, there far below. It was all true.

  His fellow refugees were decent fellows, for the most part. But they were scared, confused, with no idea of what happened next. Some of them tried to hide their fears by talking big, by swaggering. But they weren’t the ones who caused trouble, not really. It was the angry ones, like Zak, who started things. Zak frightened Elber. He was always saying how PlanEx Kalzant and the other big shots had let them down, had tricked them and cheated them. The uppers were the ones in charge of the weather. It was the bad weather that had ruined their farms. So why didn’t the PlanEx and her gang give them new farms, instead of locking them up in this place?

  Elber was no deep thinker, but even he knew that sort of talk was dangerous. It sounded like it made sense, but it didn’t, not quite. And it could stir up frightened people, turn fear into anger, make people think they had rights to things they had no right to at all, and no hope of getting.

  And it was even more dangerous to talk that way to men who had lost everything, who had no work to occupy them, who were trapped in a new world they did not understand—in a world that did not want them there.

  The people of SCO Station had been more or less welcoming, at first. But then more refugees had come, and more, and more. The station had grown more and more crowded, more dirty. Machines started breaking down. Supplies ran short. The air stopped smelling nice. And still the refugees came, none of them knowing the first thing about life aboard a station. Elber, at least, could read, but many of the others could not. He was pretty sure Zak couldn’t.

  The knot of ten or twelve men reached the exit of the Park and set forth down the walkways of the Long Boulevard.

  Elber did not understand the Boulevard. The shops full o
f precious things no one could truly ever need, the restaurants and sidewalk cafes that worked so hard to serve such little servings of odd food, the people that seemed to go there, not to do anything, but to see and be seen. It was a fairy world, a made-up place, a toy that others played with, that did not suit Elber. It was a place for the uppers, and not for the likes of him.

  It was clear to Elber—if not to Zak or some of the rowdier members of their group—that the shopkeepers and patrons of the Long Boulevard felt the same way. He could see the eyes following their group as it moved up the walkway. It took no effort at all to notice the big, tough-looking men that stood at the doors of most places. Bouncers, enforcers, muscle to keep the riffraff out.

  And Elber could see the shops and restaurants that were empty now, or boarded up, that had been open for business not so very long ago. The windows of one place across the street looked as if they had been blackened by fire. He noticed workmen installing heavy metal grillwork over the display windows of the store next to the burned one.

  “Let’s stop here!” Zak called out. Elber, looking everywhere but straight ahead, hadn’t been paying attention to where the group was going. Zak had stopped them at the entrance to a very posh sidewalk cafe, a place with tiny white tables and chairs that looked too delicate to hold the weight of burly workingmen. But the first of their group was already staking out chairs, shoving tables together, laughing and calling to each other, treating the place as if it were a farmers’ lunch counter, back home. Elber took a seat toward the edge of the group, as close to the exit as he could manage.

  Zak plopped down in a chair that nearly gave way. He took a pull off the bottle he’d been carrying, drained it, and dropped it negligently to the ground. It landed with a heavy thud, but did not break. “Let’s have a drink,” he said loudly, looking around for someone to serve him. It was plain to see Zak was drunk already.

  But the man who appeared at his elbow was no waiter. Waiters weren’t that big and didn’t look that mean. “Get your stinking, dirt-farmer, shiftless, peasant butts out of those chairs,” the enforcer said. “This is a class joint for uppers, not the likes of you.”

  “We got the same rights to be here as anyone,” Zak said, his voice angry, his eyes narrowing.

  “The hell you do, gluefoot,” the enforcer growled, leaning in closer. “This place is for station people, uppers with money, people who take baths and don’t smell. And none of that is you. Now beat it.”

  Everything went quiet. “No,” said Zak. “We stay.”

  “Leave now,” said the enforcer, “or later you’ll wish you had.”

  Zak stood up slowly and shoved his chair out of the way. Somehow the discarded bottle was back in his hand, held by the neck. He stood in close to the enforcer, nose to nose. “We stay,” he said again, his voice hard and harsh. “Now tell someone to bring us all a drink.”

  The enforcer’s hand came up, but Zak was faster. The bottle got the enforcer square on the side of the head, hard.

  The enforcer staggered back, then shook it off and propelled himself forward with a roar, slamming his fist into Zak’s gut.

  And in the blink of an eye, the fight boiled over. Three more private enforcers and a whole squad of Station Security appeared from out of nowhere, and every gluefoot on the block was suddenly in the cafe, shouting and cheering and cursing, or else launching directly into the melee.

  Every gluefoot but one. Elber slipped away out of the sidewalk cafe and back down the street toward the Ring Park entrance. He wanted no part in such things. His world had trouble enough already.

  A siren began to wail, and Elber upped his pace to a jog, and then a run, back to the camp, back to Jassa and Zari, back to the two people who were all that was left of the life he used to have.

  He got away clean, before the lockdown or the security sweeps got started.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that they heard the riot had spread far enough to shut down all of the Long Boulevard.

  A good twenty minutes after he had stepped into his cabin, Anton Koffield reemerged, carrying something, a framed 3-D photo or image of some sort.

  “Find what you were looking for?” Norla asked.

  “Yes,” Koffield said stiffly. He sat down on one side of the galley table, and Norla sat opposite him. He set the photo facedown on the table, giving Norla no chance to see what it was.

  “I’m surprised it took you this long to find it,” Norla said, trying to keep her tone of voice playful. “I didn’t think you had packed that much.”

  “I packed very little,” Koffield said. He frowned for a moment, and shook his head. “Thinking on it for a moment, it occurs to me that I own very little. I can’t imagine that the items I put in storage before I set out on the Upholder are still there. And even if they hadn’t been discarded long ago, they can’t really be said to be in my possession, not all those light-years away. Really, I suppose, the only things I truly own are what’s in that secure container, and what’s in my travel bag in my room. And, of course, this,” he said, patting the back of the picture frame. “It took me all of thirty seconds to find it. The rest of the time, I must confess, I spent staring at it, thinking about it—and working up the courage to show it to you. Other people have seen it, of course. But I didn’t have to explain it to them. You need to understand.”

  He turned the photograph over and slid it across the table to her.

  It was a perfectly ordinary full-depth photo of two men at a party, with other partygoers behind them. Both men were holding drinks and smiling at the camera. One of the men was Anton Koffield, in the full-dress uniform of a Chronologic Patrol rear admiral. His smile seemed forced, unconvincing, and he held his drink tightly, in both hands, as if frightened it would get away.

  The other man was strikingly handsome. He wore a long, flowing academic robe. He held his drink casually, lifting it in salute at the camera, with his other hand on Koffield’s shoulder. His smile was as inviting as an oasis in the desert, as warm and honest as sunshine in the morning.

  There was an inscription along the bottom of the photo, done in a firm, very legible hand. Best wishes to Anton Koffield, Oskar DeSilvo.

  “Taken by his staff photographer, the night we met. It was delivered to me the next morning, signed and framed. No doubt he had his picture taken with dozens of other people that night. No doubt they got theirs delivered the next morning as well.

  “DeSilvo had a whole office whose sole job it was to handle distributing photos and sending out thank-you letters and so on. I knew all that at the time. But for all of that, getting this photo meant a lot. I hung it on the wall of my office as a memento of the night in question. After a while, when the bloom came off the rose, so to speak, I kept it more as a souvenir of times and feelings past.

  “Later still I kept it for other reasons. Back when I was running investigations for Patrol Intelligence, I did what a lot of cops and agents and detectives have always done. They hang up the best photo of their prime suspect dead center on the wall they look at most. A photo gives you a focus, reminds you that your suspect, your quarry, your enemy, is a real person, and not a stack of allegations and file entries. That one photo you’re holding became my rogues’ gallery, all by itself.

  “But—and this is the part that I had to work up the nerve to explain to you—the other reason I’ve kept this photo was to remind me of my own foolishness. My capacity for being seduced, taken in. Oskar DeSilvo tricked me into liking him, respecting him, even loving him, at least for a while. To know that, to admit that to you, is deeply humiliating for me. Think of the loyal wife who would not believe all the evidence that her husband was philandering. Think of the confidence trickster’s victim, who can’t bear to go to the police because it would mean admitting to being a gullible fool. That’s what that photo is to me. When I feel that I have been clever, or insightful, or think I have understood everything perfectly, seen through all deceptions—then I look at that photo for a while.”

&nbs
p; Norla stared at the picture for a moment longer, then put it down, shoved it to one side. “Tell me about it,” she said. “Tell me about meeting him.”

  Koffield nodded. “It happened when I was assigned to do general research at the Grand Library. When they asked me where I wanted to go, I think I chose it simply because it happened to be the first on the list of things they offered me. I was in bad shape, past caring about most things. So they packed me off to the Grand Library habitat, orbiting Neptune. It was a posting that kept me close to Earth, to home, so they could keep an eye on me. But it was also a post that didn’t make me too visible. Just right for the sort of message they were trying to send.”

  “So you took the assignment. What then?”

  “Then I met Oskar DeSilvo.” He stood up and looked across the cabin, over Norla’s shoulder, at nothing at all. “I’d heard of him, just as you had. That is—was—his great talent. Making sure people knew who he was, and thought they knew what he did.”

  “Thought they knew?” Norla asked. “He was a terra-formist, right? The terraformist. He planned and oversaw the terraforming of planets.”

  “That’s right. At least that’s what he did in theory.”

  “I don’t follow. If he only did terraforming in theory, what did he do in practice?”

  Koffield shook his head sadly and sat down on the couch opposite Norla. “In my opinion? The one thing he was brilliant at was convincing people he was brilliant. In any event, DeSilvo had heard about me, and approached me at that party. He was the only one at the party who deigned to speak to me. It caused quite a stir in the crowd when he came over to me—and it touched something in me I didn’t even know was still there. The gesture of very obviously speaking with me in public hooked me in, as it was no doubt intended to do. Sending the photo to me was more of the same.”He’d donated his papers and files and so on to the Grand Library, and he was overseeing the cataloging of all the material. That sort of summed DeSilvo up, in a way. Breathing down the necks of all the specialists, making sure they did it his way, because only his way could be right, making sure that his work was noticed, acknowledged, honored.”