Guilty of what? Norla wondered as the moments slid past and Koffield said no more. How could reading all of the book make a difference regarding guilt or innocence? But she knew it would be best to let Anton Koffield tell things in his own way—if she could keep him talking. The question of DeSilvo’s guilt or innocence, whatever the crime, seemed to weigh heavily on Koffield, and it had to do with this book. That was the tack she should take to get him to go on. “Do you think he did read it?” she asked.
Koffield glanced at her, then returned his gaze to the porthole. “It doesn’t seem likely he’d rebuild a planet if he didn’t read the whole book, does it? Occam’s Razor tells us to follow the simple, obvious explanation,” he said. “And yet.” He did not speak again for a moment. “And yet, and yet, and yet. There are events in our lives, in our history, times and places where and when the most improbable explanations congregate, where the fate of millions is determined by some trivial and improbable event. One of the biggest wars of the mid near ancients, a war that killed millions, started because a groundcar took a wrong turn and then doubled back to meet the trap that had not been quite ready to spring when the car first went past. The decision to abandon Mars was made twenty years later than it should have been because an indifferent marksman missed an easy shot and later made a far more difficult one, killing the wrong man at the wrong time. Research into timeshaft wormholes went up a blind alley for forty years because no one realized that one measuring instrument had been installed backwards and so kept giving the expected answer, instead of the right one.
“Maybe DeSilvo read the book a dozen times or more, always excited by the possibilities in the early going, but never once getting all the way through the pessimistic bits at the ending. Or maybe he dismissed the last section as overcautious. I’ve dreamed up a half dozen or more such reeds I can cling to. Some of them are even believable. Because the alternative is that Dr. Oskar DeSilvo knowingly doomed the entire population, the entire planet, the entire future of Solace for the sake of his own ego.” And once again, Koffield said no more, and simply stared out the porthole. But this time, there was something in his silence, his stillness, that suggested there was no more to be said, that his tale had reached its end.
But that couldn’t possibly be the end. Unless she was expected to go the rest of the way. herself. And, she realized, maybe she could. No need to have it spoon-fed to her. Suddenly, it all fell into place. Connect the dots, she told herself.
Then she saw it. “What the last pages of the second book said was that a Solace-style terraforming might not work,” she said. “But put together with what we’ve learned since, the mathematics in the book was enough to tell anyone who looked that the terraforming technique could not work.”
Koffield blinked in mild surprise and returned his attention to her. “Quite right,” he said quietly. “Keep going.”
“The third book,” said Norla. “There was something more in the third book. What? Did Baskaw see in her own math what you saw? That it could be used for more?”
“Full marks,” Koffield said. “Exactly right. Baskaw saw what I saw, and went farther down the path she had laid out for herself. She called the third book Ecologic and Climatic Stability of Artificial Environments Formed by Certain Means.
“I wonder about her at times, about Ulan Baskaw. There is virtually no information about her. Not so much as a biographical note in the back of any of the books. There’s no mention of her date or place of birth, or of death. I am not even absolutely sure she was a woman. Ulan could have been a man’s name. All we have to tell us about her is the books themselves, their dates of publication and other internal clues, the way things are phrased in the text. Probably there are experts in such things who could wring more information out of the texts, but I doubt there would be much.
“But the dates. The dates of the books. I came across all three of them, side by side, all together on the shelf, identical bindings and printings, as if they were all of a piece, and had been that way from the start.
“But the dates—and even the tone of the writing—tell a different story. She—or perhaps he—wrote, or at least published, the first in the year 4306, Earth Reckoning Common Era, and it was identified as her thesis from the University of Toowoomba—but for what sort of degree or certificate or whatever, it’s impossible to say. And there’s no University of Toowoomba anymore, anyway. Disbanded centuries ago. But she was young, and full of enthusiasm for her subject, even if population statistics seems dry as toast for us. The youth and enthusiasm shine through the pedantry here and there. She dedicated the book to a professor. That is something a young person would do.
“The second book is dated 4316, ten years later. The writing is more solid, more mature, more levelheaded. There is a confidence, a strength, a pride in the writing. She knows she has come up with something new and exciting, perhaps even important. She is pleased with that, but cautious, even restrained.
“The third book is dated 4359, fifty-three years after the first book, forty-three after the second. There was a time in human history when fifty-three years was considered a full lifetime. In any human life, fifty-three years is a long time. What happened in her life between the first book and the last? Did she publish a dozen works that did not chance to come down to us? Did she never write another word? Was her life full of happiness and contentment, or did one disaster follow another? Did she have a family? Children? Was she consumed by her work, in love with ecology and mathematics all her days, or was it but a passing fancy of youth she came back to on a whim in her later days? Did she write the third book to put to rest ghosts of doubt that had haunted her entire life, or simply to pass the time once she retired?
“How and when and why did she discover her mistakes? Did the errors come to light just as some forgotten terra-forming project based on them was about to start up, and she or someone else chanced upon the truth? Was a whole terraforming project abruptly canceled when her mistake was found too late? There’s no record of any such for the dates in question, but records get lost or erased or forgotten. Or was the question utterly academic, of no real-world importance? Did she write the third book simply because she liked to make things tidy? It’s impossible to know.
“But I think I was able to read between the lines of that third, slim volume. There was guilt, and sorrow, and regret whispering through the stiff, careful, scholarly prose. I think the old woman—or man—who wrote that third book did so in search of some sort of absolution. The author of that book wanted to put right something that had gone wrong. What, exactly, we’ll never know.”
“Her mistakes. What were her mistakes?”
Koffield stood up, and turned his back on the porthole. He walked to the exact center of the deck and turned to face Norla. He spoke, raising his voice so it would carry across the distance he had put between them. “The center of it all,” he said. Some trick of the compartment’s acoustics put the slightest of echoes behind his voice. Norla could read the tension, the anxiety, in his expression. “The center of it all. In the second book, it seems that it never occurred to her to use the mathematics she herself had invented in order to explore her own ideas on terraforming.
“But in the third book, she does just that. The ‘Certain Means’ of the third book’s title—by that she meant the ideas she herself had put forward. And in that third book she proved those ‘certain means’ had to result in an unstable planetary ecology. Any planet terraformed by those means would fail. Inevitably, and absolutely.”
“And that was the method DeSilvo had used,” Norla said. “He built Solace on the edge of a cliff.”
“And now it’s about to fall off it,” Koffield said. “If we had gotten here when we were supposed to, there would have been time to warn them, time to evacuate them. But now . . .now it’s too late. They might, or they might not, listen to me. Even if they do, it’s hard to know what good could be done.”
“Why didn’t you go to DeSilvo?” Norla asked. “Obviously he
wasn’t entirely rational about Solace, but would he really have been willing to snuff out all those lives?”
“Probably not. Of course, he had to be at least somewhat delusional to go as far as he had. But yes, I think if I could have gotten him to understand, he would have stepped in—if for no reason than to save his life’s work. He saw Solace as a monument to himself, and he wouldn’t want it ruined. I wanted to go to him, once I was ready. I wanted to be sure, wanted to have a clear, cogent set of arguments that he couldn’t refute. I was a long, long way from trusting him, but I realized that I was going to have to go public with the information if it was going to be of any use. Once I did that, he would know about it anyway.
“When I returned from the Main PPC, the first thing I did was book passage on the Dom Pedro IV, bound for Solace, so I could present my warnings personally. Then I set to work on my analysis. I had only been at it a few days when I learned that the Chrononaut VI was in Earth orbit, and had changed her routing. She was headed for Solace, departing in five days’ time. There was no way I could get a berth aboard her, and in any event, I wasn’t ready to go. My work wasn’t finished. I put together whatever material I could and sent a lasergram to the Chrononaut, for relay to the authorities on Solace. The ‘gram contained the text of a quick preliminary report, and a cover message saying I would be traveling aboard the Dom Pedro IV some weeks later with more complete and detailed information.
“Then, three days after the Chrononaut left, DeSilvo died. Again.”
“Again?” Norla asked.
“Medically dead, not legally,” Koffield said. “DeSilvo was an old, old man, and he had died many times. But he was also a rich and influential man, living in a place with superb medical facilities. The Grand Library has—or at least had, a hundred years ago—its own hospital. For that matter, DeSilvo’s research and archives staff members had their own private, and very advanced, medical clinic.
“They told me DeSilvo had had a new heart, a sprint-bud clone grown from his own DNA, implanted a few months before. It had been his third heart replacement. Apparently the new heart had failed in some way—not uncommon in a man that old who has had multiple organ replacements. And DeSilvo had had new everything at one point or another. Heart, lungs, liver, spleen, eyes. After a while, the stresses of the repeated surgeries can be too much. DeSilvo had collapsed. They drew fresh DNA samples from him, then put him in temporal confinement at maximum displacement—in effect stopping time for him while they grew him yet another new heart. It’s a long, complicated process, and the medical people saw no reason to rush it. He was still in the confinement when I went aboard the Dom Pedro IV. I never had a chance to talk with him about what I had learned. I’ll never know how he would have reacted.”
Koffield lifted his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes wearily. He lowered his hands, and looked at them, as if expecting—or at least wishing—that they were not empty, that there was something he could do, something he could’ accomplish. “So I never got to ask him—did you know you doomed a world, and simply not care? Or were you just incompetent? Was it ego or stupidity?
“But even destroying a world doesn’t get to the worst of it,” he said. “It doesn’t get to the depths of what DeSilvo failed to see, or refused to see. Did he read the third book? If he did, and then went ahead with the Solace project, blood is on his hands, a planet’s worth, generations of it. And yet all that blood will be as nothing. Nothing at all, in the long run. It will be nothing more than a drop lost in the deepest of oceans.”
Norla stood, and walked a step or two closer to him. Her own heart was suddenly pounding, her own blood roaring through her veins. There was something that scared Anton Koffield, and anything that scared him had to be terrifying indeed. “How could that be?” she demanded. “Losing a whole planet—what could make that seem insignificant?”
He moved a step or two away from her, not in any particular direction, but simply not wishing to be too close to her, to anyone.
Get close to something, and it hurts when you lose it, Norla thought, and drew back herself. “What is worse?” she asked again.
“Work the math,” Koffield said bitterly, his voice quiet and cold. “All you need to do is work the math. Eliminate as many variables as you can. Simplify by canceling out whatever you can from both sides of the equation. Sometimes— not always, but sometimes-^-the more you can cancel out, the more generalized the equation, and the more things it can tell you. Sometimes it’s all the things with meaning that cancel out, and what you end up with doesn’t tell you anything at all. Sometimes the math is very elegant, very pretty and simple, and quite meaningless.
“And sometimes it takes fifty years, or a hundred years, to learn enough to let you spot the variables and values and whole subequations that can be done away with. Or it takes that long to see what the very pretty equation that seemed to say nothing is actually telling you.”
Koffield looked hard at Norla, as if daring her to turn away from what he had to say. “Baskaw’s commentary at the back of the second book used some complicated math to show that the techniques used at Solace might be unstable. The third book used some simplified and generalized— but still very complex—versions of the same math to demonstrate that Solace, or any world terraformed in the same way, must be unstable. Baskaw did not have a large enough base of knowledge and data to go further. Today we do. I did what any modern worker in the field would be able to do. I cleared a lot of the underbrush out of her math, eliminated things that didn’t need to be in it, and brought it down to very simple terms.
“Among other things, what the Baskaw formulae tell us is that, all other things being equal, the period of stability for a given artificial ecosystem is a function of its inherent, internal complexity and the time it took to establish the ecosystem. Stability equals Complexity times Development Time. S equals Q times T(d). S=Q*T(d). The simpler the ecology, and the faster it is created, the shorter the time it will last. Solace is a very simple ecology, and was created in a great hurry. Solace is doomed.”
“But you already told me that. You said there was something worse.”
“There is!” Koffield almost shouted. “I just told you! That same formula applies to every other artificial environment, and the value for complexity is not very high on any of them. There have been ecological collapses before— starting with the Mars disaster, right on up to the present day.
“We’ve always told ourselves they were one-off mistakes, caused by this or that specific failure. Fix this problem, enhance that system, try it again, and everything will be fine. But that’s not true. The problem is systemic. It’s inherent in the process. It’s true everywhere, all the time. There are lots of ways to mask the problem, and lots of ways to fix things, at least for a while. You can double or triple the period of stability, if you try hard enough and get lucky. You can even do better than that by importing additional species and bio-mass. But absent that sort of manipulation, what it comes down to is this: Take five thousand years to build a completely isolated ecology, and it will last about five thousand years. Take five years, and it will last about five.”
Koffield pointed out the porthole to the station outside, to Solace, to the universe. “Every terraformed planet, every habitat, is doomed. Sooner or later, they’re all going to fail. All of them. And there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.”
SOLACE CENTRAL ORBITAL STATION
CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Deepest Tower
Norla rolled up her sleeve and activated the subcutaneous injector against her right shoulder. The device shot its drugs and antibodies and pseudovirals under her skin. She didn’t know, and didn’t care, if the cocktail of chemicals in the injector was supposed to keep her from spreading a plague she carried out into the station or supposed to keep her from catching a plague that was already out there. Norla felt numb, lost, her spirit deadened. If she caught their plague, or they caught hers, what did it matter? They were all going to die. The planet was going to colla
pse.
Koffield used his own injector, then readjusted the sleeve of his tunic and needlessly straightened his collar. He looked every bit the ramrod-straight military man, emotionless, imperturbable. Norla envied him that. She had no such ready-built role she could draw on, or hide behind. She had only herself.
But if Koffield had his military persona to hide behind, to use as a shield between the outer world and his inner self, there had to be a cost. It had to eat at him. How much of the inner man still survived behind that shield-wall? How much of his soul had been hollowed out by the endless discipline, the rigid self-control?
“Ready?” he asked her.
“No,” she replied, quite honestly. “Let’s go.”
He nodded and worked the airlock controls. The inner door slid open, and they stepped inside, Koffield hauling the secured container along with him, as well as a carrier bag packed with spare clothes, toiletries, and the like. Norla carried a similar personal effects bag, along with a small utility satchel, but the latter was more for form’s sake than anything else. It held a pocket camera and a note recorder, but beyond that, she couldn’t think of much she’d be certain to need. She had not the faintest idea what was to happen next. She could think of a thousand things they might need, from gas masks to assault lasers to Artlnt pocket translators to inertial trackers, more than would be possible to carry. But even given the evidence they had already seen that not all was as it should have been aboard SCO Station, it seemed to her it would be more diplomatic to assume—or at least pretend—that everything on board would be normal.
Norla stepped into the airlock, sealed the inner door, and reached for the button that would open the outer.
Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten stood on the walkway inside the Personnel Access Tunnel, a meter or two back from the ship-end of the PAT, staring thoughtfully at the hull of the—well, mystery ship was probably the most accurate term. He had burrowed deep into the station’s record archives and been able to confirm a number of details concerning the Cruzeiro do Sul’s story, but the whole affair sounded too much like the sort of story invented to scare children sitting around a campfire. The ghost ship that came out of the past, the dead crew returned to life.
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