The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  A low double-chime indicated the Mansion’s Artlnt service system had heard and understood.

  Neshobe Kalzant stood up and stretched her arms wide, providing as clear a cue as possible to everyone else that it was all right for them to do the same. The conference table waited until everyone had gotten up, then extruded an arm that cleared its surface and stowed everything in a lower compartment. Then the table folded itself up and rolled out of the way.

  Neshobe took advantage of the moment when everyone was getting out of the table’s way. She moved to the far end of the room, folded her arms across her chest, and turned to look out the window, using her posture and body language to make it as plain as possible that she wanted a moment or two on her own. She did it so effectively that even Ashdin took the hint, after a moment’s hesitation. For a second or two, Neshobe could see, out of the corner of her eye, that the woman was watching her and considering the idea of coming over for a nice chat. Neshobe turned more directly toward the window, and that seemed to do the trick. She watched the reflection in the window as Ashdin shrugged and turned toward the refreshment cart that was rolling itself into the room.

  Neshobe had discovered shortly after taking on the job of Planetary Executive that very clear body language could often do what it had just done—stop an awkward social encounter before it had even begun.

  Her desire to be alone with her thoughts having been established, she turned her back on the window for a moment and considered the other people in the room, each in turn, watching as they helped themselves to tea, fruit, pastry, and whatever else the Artlnt system had served up.

  First off, the two visitors from long ago, and far away— Norla Chandray and Anton Koffield. Plainly neither of them was in very good shape at the moment. Not that she could blame them, considering the shocks and stresses they had already been through.

  Then, Grand Senyor Jorl Parrige, who had, the stars bless him, left his assistant behind. Fribart always got her nervous. But Parrige was a rock. She needed him.

  Then there was Wandella Ashdin. She was supposed to be a brilliant historian, an expert on the early years of the founding of Solace, and on the parallel subject of the life and work of Oskar DeSilvo. Neshobe’s people had fished her up from the local university.

  Ashdin was plainly overawed and overexcited by the situation—and, interestingly enough, it was Koffield, and not the local political heavyweights, who fascinated her.

  Every time the man opened his mouth, Ashdin turned and stared at him, with every bit of the intensity her watery blue eyes could muster. At a guess, she was trying to memorize everything he said. It had pained Ashdin no end that this meeting was to be off the record. She had brought all sorts of recording and note-taking hardware, and had seemed near tears when told she was not going to be able to use it.

  But Koffield’s presence made up for that. Koffield, after all; had actually met DeSilvo, talked to him, truly known him. Ashdin had so far restricted herself to asking fairly sensible questions, but it was plainly a major effort of will for her not to pin Koffield to the spot and ask what Oskar DeSilvo was really like. Or maybe she was asking that very question now.

  Then came Dr. Milos Vandar, the biotechnician who stood next to Ashdin at the refreshment table, trying to get at the samovar she was blocking as she nattered on at Koffield. Ashdin, busily monopolizing the long-suffering Koffield, was unaware of his presence.

  Vandar had not been able to say, absolutely and incon-trovertibly, that Koffield’s work was accurate. But neither had he come remotely near saying Koffield had gotten anything seriously wrong. And Vandar was a man of enough imagination to understand the implications if Koffield’s analysis was even close,to the truth. To see a man like Vandar badly worried and distracted told Neshobe just how serious the matter could be. And Vandar seemed even more upset and distracted than Koffield.

  Then, finally, pacing the far corner of the room, the only one besides herself who was taking no refreshment, there was Karlin Raenau. Neshobe and Raenau had worked together reasonably well over the years, but their relations had been correct and businesslike, rather than friendly. She had never felt any sort of connection with the man.

  And yet, now, having heard his description of his meeting with Koffield and Chandray, and its aftermath, she realized that they did have something in common: They both hated their offices—not their jobs, but the actual, physical offices, the rooms where they were required to do their work. Both Raenau’s office and her own had been designed by the same man. It was plain from what he had said that his workplace bedeviled him with the same sort of nuisances that beset her, and for that they could both thank the great genius Oskar DeSilvo.

  DeSilvo. Damn the man. He seemed to be at the back of everything. Ashdin, along with most of the population of Solace, was quite sure DeSilvo had been a genius. But the more Neshobe learned about him, and was called upon to deal with his legacy directly, the more she doubted he was any such thing. If he had been a genius, he was one who seemed to have made nothing but mistakes. From his terra-forming the planet to laying out an office workspace, she could find nothing but muddle in his work.

  The people in the story about the Emperor’s new clothes had merely joined in pretending the Emperor was dressed in splendor. The people of Solace went one better. They were truly not aware that old Oskar was buck-naked. They genuinely believed DeSilvo had been a genius.

  DeSilvo. The damned old man had been dead—truly and finally dead—for a hundred years or more, and yet it was as if he was in the room as well.

  Well, that made sense. He had, after all, designed the place. Neshobe considered the office, the DeSilvo-designed room itself. The Diamond Room, they called it. The room was shaped, more or less, like an oblong,-octagonal-cut jewel. The floor was white marble, and the ceiling was another of the damned skylights DeSilvo had put everywhere. But it was the walls—if you could call a system of concave-angled panels walls—that were the defining feature of the room.

  Panels angled out from the octagonal ceiling and floor at about a thirty-degree angle, and between these upper and lower panels was a set of center panels a.t waist level. The center panels, at least, were at right angles to the floor, as walls are supposed to be. The eight sides of the room were aligned with the cardinal and semicardinal points of the compass. The west and east sides of the room were the longest, the north and south sides exactly half as wide, and the northeast, northwest, southwest, and southeast sides were narrower still, really nothing more than angles set into the corners of the longer sides.

  The center and upper wall panels at the east, west, and south of the room were permanently transparent, like the skylight, and the room was positioned so as to provide dramatic vistas out three sides of the room. Neshobe wasn’t entirely clear on the matter, but her understanding was that the clear wall panels and ceiling were supposed to symbolize open government. No doubt Ashdin could have told her, if Neshobe had dared ask. Neshobe did know that the splendid views from the windows were supposed to imbue the planetary leader with vision and ambition.

  She also knew that it was by no means an accident that there was a lot to see—or at least there would be a lot to see, if the weather ever cleared. The Executive Mansion had been built on a bluff overlooking Solace City, and the sea beyond, on a carefully chosen and landscaped site. Supposedly, DeSilvo had picked the site for the Mansion first, and then laid out the city to provide an impressive view as seen from it.

  The east side of the room presented one with a raw and barren rockscape, littered with craters: the unterraformed part of Solace. To the south lay Solace City itself: the signal achievement of the present age—at least in the mind of the architect who had designed both the city and the view of it. A grand highway, little used in an age of aircars, led from the city to the airport/spaceport complex, due south of town. Beyond the aero-spaceport was the seaport, and beyond that, the waters of Landing Bay stretched to the horizon.

  Neshobe had read somewhere that
a person considering the view south was supposed to reflect on the juxtaposition of land, air, space, and sea transport, and the part each had played in the history of exploration, expansion, and settlement. That notion had always irritated Neshobe. When she looked out a window, she wanted a view, not a lecture on high-minded notions written in visual symbols.

  To the west lay lush and verdant parklands of Nova-terra Reserve, more than merely terraformed, but elaborately landscaped and planted, the old craters transformed into lakes and ponds: the radiant, living future of the world.

  DeSilvo had, by all accounts, been much taken with the conversion of dead craters into living bodies of water. For him, it had been a potent symbol of remaking the lifeless into the living, and he had used the motif in many ways, in many places. The unfortunate fact that there had been no craters to work with in Novaterra had been dealt with by digging craters and then filling them with water. A silly extravagance, it seemed to Neshobe, but one that hardly mattered anymore. Half of Novaterra Reserve had been ruined by mudslides, and the lakes and ponds had long since overflowed their basins. Flooded-out artificial lakes in artificial craters. That should have been a symbol of something, but Neshobe was not sure what.

  The trouble was that, since the rains had come, the grand views and all their sanctimonious symbolism might as well not have been there. Whatever the character of the rain at any given moment—drizzle, mist, downpour— it cut visibility to only a few hundred meters at best. Besides, the transparent wall and ceiling panels, designed for the far drier climate that had once existed, tended to fog up. The Diamond Room was shrouded in mist and fog. And that was symbolism plain enough for anyone to read.

  Neshobe hated the Diamond Room, but it was the most famous room in the Executive Mansion, and probably the most famous on the planet. She was more or less compelled to use it. People expected it of her. A meeting that took place in the Diamond Room was, by virtue of that fact alone, imbued with importance. The time or two she had tried to use a more practical and comfortable room, the participants had taken it as a sign that they, or the subjects of their meetings, were not important enough to rate the Diamond Room treatment. Getting into it, for whatever reason, was a great honor. Ashdin had nearly had palpitations at the mere thought of seeing it, let alone sitting down in it, no matter how grim the occasion.

  And this extremely grim occasion was far from over. There was still a lot left to discuss. No sense denying herself the bite to eat the others were having. She’d need a little something to tide her over. Neshobe Kalzant forced herself to relax, willed a sincere-looking smile onto her face, and went over to join the others.

  The refreshment cart trundled itself out of the room, and the doors of the Diamond Room folded shut behind it. The conference table had reopened itself, and placed everyone’s papers and possessions precisely back in their previous positions. Neshobe took her place at the head of the table and waited for the others to do the same.

  “Very well,” she said. “We’re back in session. Let me just go over what happened this morning, to be sure I have it clear. I’ve heard from all of you, all the evidence that’s been checked, all the rush research that’s been done, the navigational analysis of the Dom Pedro’s journey brought in by Commander Raenau, and so on. As you’ll understand, Admiral Koffield, Second Officer Chandray, we had to find out as best we could if you were indeed who you claim to be, if you got here by the means you claimed, and if the warning you brought is authentically from the last century.”

  Neshobe turned to Vandar. “If I’ve got this straight, Dr. Vandar, you found the prediction highly, even fright-eningly accurate, and that where it was in error, the errors of prediction seem to have been caused by unforeseeable events, such as the mass transport of refugees from Glister several decades ago.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s difficult to quantify such things, but I’d estimate that the predictive value of Admiral Koffield’s work, if we compare it directly to real circumstances, is on the order of about sixty-five percent accurate.”

  “That doesn’t sound so startlingly good,” said Jorl Parrige.

  “Ah, no, Senyor Parrige, you’re right. But I was about to say that it’s more complicated than that. Admiral Koffield developed a sophisticated mathematical model and applied it against the real Solace of a hundred-plus years ago, and then projected forward, assuming everything would go according to plan. But, as the admiral knew at the time, things don’t go according to plan. The unexpected happens, and the plan itself changes. We have to correct for those factors.”

  “So you change the model to fit the circumstances?” Parrige asked, the disapproval plain in his voice.

  “No, sir, of course not,” Vandar replied, sounding almost offended. “The model remains the same. It is merely a question of adjusting and correcting the data that we feed to the model. Now, I have to confess that I have had very little time to work with the Koffield model, and I don’t pretend to understand it completely. But I have managed to plug in at least rough corrections for the two largest classes of major, unplanned, great-impact events: the influx of refugees from Glister, and the repeated restorations and repair done to SunSpot and Greenhouse. De-Silvo’s original plan called for SunSpot and Greenhouse to be decommissioned over seventy years ago. With those corrections plugged in, I got a predictive value match of about eighty-five percent, on a first pass. I have no doubt at all that, given more and better data, I could get it up over ninety percent, perhaps even to ninety-two percent, or ninety-four or ninety-five. It’s a strong, solid model. Far better than the tools we’ve been using up to now. But the model’s ability to predict the present situation is secondary. Far more important is what it predicts for the future.”

  “And what is that?” Parrige asked. “In layman’s terms.”

  Vandar shook his head sadly. “In layman’s terms? Disaster. Absolute catastrophe. A collapse every bit as hard and deep as the one at Glister or Far Haven. The current planetary ecosystem is headed for sudden and drastic collapse that will make our present problems look trivial. If you want to be melodramatic about it, we’re doomed.”

  “Just a moment, please, Dr. Vandar,” Neshobe said. Damn the man. Melodrama, however accurate, was the last thing they needed at the moment. A situation this frightening, this emotional, absolutely demanded cold, careful, calm discussion. The people around the conference table were already close to the edge. There was no sense, and no purpose served, in pushing them closer to it, or over it. The best time to defuse panic was before it got started. “I need to take it one step at a time. All I need to know from you at the moment is that you are satisfied that the work pre-. sented by Admiral Koffield is legitimate. Is the math honest, are the assumptions valid, and so on. I take it you are satisfied?”

  Vandar nodded vigorously. “Very much so. I feel certain that—”

  “Please, Dr. Vandar. We will explore further in a moment. Right now I just want to be sure we have some sort of consensus. Commander Raenau, your people have examined the spacecraft our friends came in on, and run navigation checks on the course for the, ah, Dom Pedro IV, along with various other details, such as the identity match performed by your command system before it unlocked the report. Does their story hold together?”

  Raenau limited himself to the briefest possible answer. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  “Any sign of fraud or tampering? Any indication that this might be a huge trick being played on us?”

  “No, ma’am. And believe me, we’ve looked.”

  “And what they’ve described is physically possible? The ship could do what they said it could do?”

  Raenau hesitated just a fraction of a second. “Ye—es. The only questionable or implausible part is the failure of the ship. The chances against that sort of systems failure are so long as to be nearly incalculable. The chances against a ship’s arriving at its destination, however late, after any major systems failure, are nearly as great. The chances of both failure and safe arrival are beyond
astronomical. Unless, of course, we don’t assume it was chance. And, obviously, the substitution of scrap material for the final report in the admiral’s secured container couldn’t be chance.”

  “Our ship was sabotaged,” Koffield said. “There’s no point in being coy about it. The information I was bringing to you was deliberately stolen. That much, at least, is obvious.”Koffield. Neshobe considered the man thoughtfully for a moment before she answered him. He had not spoken much, and reports from Raenau and other sources on SCO Station painted a picture of a rigidly controlled man who had snapped, quite understandably, under tremendous pressure. He was, in short, a man struggling to put himself back together. The signs were there if one looked carefully. The way his hands tensed, the way the muscles in his jaw flexed, the hunted look in his eyes. He was a man trying to appear calm and in control, rather than a man who actually was those things.

  “I agree with you, Admiral,” Neshobe said. “That is the obvious and inescapable conclusion. Who did it, and why, are vital questions—but they are not questions we are concerned with at the moment.”

  “Point taken, Madam Executive,” Koffield said.

  Neshobe nodded at Koffield and turned her attention to the historian. “Dr. Ashdin. You’re intimately familiar with the historical record of the times and places and people in question. Is there anything in the record that would tell us that these people are not who they say they are, or anything that would serve to contradict or disprove the story they told?”

  “There’s a great deal of information to get through, and of course I’d like to interview both Admiral Koffield and Second Officer Chandray at great length. In particular, I’d like to learn about how the admiral and Dr. DeSilvo—”

  “None of that,” Neshobe said sharply. Let Ashdin get started again, and they’d all still be here when the planet died. “Not now, anyway. Later perhaps, if Admiral Koffield and Officer Chandray are willing to cooperate. Just answer the question. Do you have any reason to think these people are not who they claim to be?”