The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Seek him out?” Norla shouted. “The man who wrecked all our lives so completely? The man who made Solace a shambles, but didn’t have the courage to face the people he had hurt?”

  “Faster-than-light travel,” said Anton Koffield. “Think of it. What would you not trade for that? Who would you refuse to deal with, in exchange for that prize?”

  “Is there more?” Wandella asked. “Is that the end?”

  “There’s more,” said Koffield.

  I have much to offer, and many secrets I can reveal when you find me, though I dare not tell them to you in this letter. There is, however, one last confession I must make. You have been blamed for Circum Central. Not just for losing the ships, but for sealing the wormhole. In the time in which I write, you are still reviled for this crime. Perhaps, even a century hence, that is how you will be remembered.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Koffield said. “I’m not just remembered. I’m a monster.”

  “Only to some,” said Wandella. “Most people have forgotten, or never knew.”

  “Is that supposed to be comforting?” Koffield asked her, his long-contained anger nearly breaking free. “It isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry. Go on with the letter.”

  The time has come for you to learn the truth. I cannot now explain their mission in detail, but I must tell you one thing about the ships you called the Intruders. Much was made of the fact that they first went uptime through the wormhole, from past to future. Why, many people wondered at the time, did they do this? Why run the risks and take the losses of sending robotic ships into the future, when all they would need to do is wait in normal space until they had reached the time in question?

  There are two reasons. The first is fairly straightforward. For various technical reasons, having mainly to do with their power systems, the ships would have deteriorated by then. The second reason was suggested now and then by the theory-spinners, but never much considered. The ships needed to do a calibration run, a passage through the wormhole that allowed them to get precise and detailed measurement of the wormhole’s structure.

  “Oh my God.” Koffield stared at the page, read the next paragraph or two silently, and felt his knees buckle. Anger and shock swept over him. “This is the worst,” he said, his voice suddenly no more than a whisper. “This next is the worst shock of all. Damn the man!”

  “What is it?” Wandella asked.

  “My life wrecked,” Koffield said, anger helping him find his voice again. “My career wrecked. Marooned in time, not once, but twice, by Oskar DeSilvo. Pointed out as a killer.

  “ ‘Terrible Anthon closed up the sky Horrible Anthon made Glister die Closed up the sky, made Glister die, Made Glister die, no ship could fly Hideous Anthon closed up the sky.’

  “That’s about me. About me. Because I did my job. The Glisterns use my name to scare children. I am the criminal, the monster. And the great Oskar DeSilvo builds his own monuments, and they all tell me he’s a hero. And now. And now—”

  “Read it,” Norla said. “Please. Read it out loud.”

  The ships needed this information in order to complete one element of their mission. I had sent them to perform several tasks—including the sealing of the Circum Central wormhole. It pains me to say it, but you must know, before you come to face me. If you had done nothing, nothing at all, if your ship had stood by, if your ship had not been there at all, my ships would have completed their work by entering the uptime end of the wormhole and seating it, for all time. They were programmed to shut it down. In all truth, I believe it is impossible to say whether they did the deed, or whether the commands sent by your ship did the job. I cannot now tell you why the deed was necessary. But I assure you that, if you had not acted, the deed would have been done.

  I could not reveal my part in the Circum. Central incident without compromising operations of the utmost importance. It grieved me no end to see the punishment you took, and the guilt you carried in your soul because of deeds you did not do. It was my guilt on this point that led me to approach you, and invite you to join my staff. The sequels to that gesture are, as you will know as well as I, still being played out.

  I am sorry. I offer you my sincere, heartfelt, and most humble apologies. Accept them or refuse them as you will. Hate me, forgive me. Feel what you will toward me, and I will accept it. There are larger matters at stake, and my own guilt and shame do not matter.

  Only one thing does matter.

  Seek me out.

  With heartfelt respect, I remain

  Your sincere admirer,

  Doctor Oskar DeSilvo

  Anton Koffield dropped the letter on the table, turned, and left the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The Depths of Time

  Norla sat in the sterile, faceless compartment that served as her bedroom, there in the quarantine bunker, and debated with herself. Should she go and talk to Koffield? Three hours had passed since Anton had read DeSilvo’s letter to her and Wandella. He had shut himself up in his room immediately afterward and not come out since. Would it be wiser to let the man be, let him wrap himself in privacy, in control, and deal with the shocks, the insults, the cruelty of it all that way? Or should she force him to engage ia conversation, talk it through?

  She had decided to let him be a half dozen times and changed her mind just as often. She did not know what to do, what was right.

  But not to act was to decide. Settled Space was filled to bursting with the consequences of people who found reasons not to act, people who convinced themselves that doing whatever it took to avoid trouble was really the best, the wisest, the noblest course of action.

  People like Oskar DeSilvo.

  That notion was enough to decide her. She had stood up and was reaching for the door latch when the knock came on the door. Wandella, probably. Norla had thought the woman had gone to sleep. Poor Wandella. She had had her worldview turned upside down as well, if not as severely as Anton.

  She opened the door.

  “May I come in?” asked Anton Koffield.

  “Oh! Yes, yes, of course. I thought you were going to be Wandella. Please, come in.”

  She ushered Koffield in, closed the door behind him, gestured for him to take a seat on the chair, and took a seat herself on the bunk. She was not particularly surprised that he didn’t sit.

  He stood before her, in the same style of shapeless plain brown coveralls that she wore, all they issued for clothing in the quarantine ward. Somehow he wore them with a brisk, military air. He folded his arms and smiled sadly down at her.

  “It hasn’t been an easy day,” he said. “None of them has been easy. Not since we got to Solace.”

  “They haven’t been easy for you for a lot longer than that,” Norla said.

  “No,” he agreed. He turned and stared at the blank steel wall next to the door for a moment. “They haven’t. And after what we learned, what I learned today, somehow now they seem even worse. I had just convinced myself that it was all blind bad luck, forces beyond my control. Now I know. Now I know what it was. Who it was. I have never been so angry in my life. I will go on being angry for a very long time.”

  Anton gestured upward with a grand sweep of his.arm, as if to indicate all of space. “All the stories, all the lies are out there. They have a hundred-and-twenty-seven-year head start on the truth. And the truth will never catch up. When I go to my grave, the ancestors of today’s GHsterns will not just believe, they will know, as absolutely certain fact, that Horrible Anthon made Glister die. And they’ll raise a toast to Oskar DeSilvo, who built the planet Solace and gave them a place of refuge.

  “But maybe even that isn’t the worst. I thought I was a free man, acting as I saw fit. But all that time, I was a rat in DeSilvo’s maze, walking in the path he set for me, falling into the traps he set. I was his puppet. Even now, he pulls the strings, from a hundred years and light-years away, and my muscles twitch, and I move in the way he bids me.”

  “You’re going after him,�
� Norla said. It was not a question. It had never entered her head that he would not go.Koffield was not a man who found good reasons to do nothing.

  “I wish I wasn’t,” Koffield said. “With every fiber of my being, I want to turn my back on him, on Solace, on the terraforming disaster. I want to say ‘I’ve done my part. Leave me in peace. Let someone else do the work.’ But I can’t. I want to leave it be. But I can’t.”

  “That’s not DeSilvo pulling the strings,” Norla said, standing up again. “That’s duty. He has no claim on you, no power. You won’t go after him because he asks. You’ll do it because it’s right. Because if he has stolen knowledge, science, technology that might save us, then someone has to take it back. Go. Find it. Take it back. Deal with the devil, because you have to—and see to it that he gets the worst of the bargain.”

  Koffield nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I learned very early that you knew how to see beyond what was before you. You have just demonstrated that skill again. It is one I value tremendously. And if I go in search of Oskar DeSilvo, I’ll have need of it.”

  “Admiral? Anton? What do you mean?”

  “I came in here to ask if you’d come with me. I am going to need your help. I’m sure of that. If I go after DeSilvo, will you go with me?”

  Norla Chandray had not given a moment’s thought to her own life, her future, here in the future. She had no doubt that she could build a life of sorts in the Solacian system. Someone always needed a pilot.

  But it was not merely the future that she faced. From Ulan Baskaw’s long-lost books to the collapse on Solace that was just gathering strength, forces were reaching up from the past, the present, the future, bubbling up from the ocean of years.

  She could drift where she was on that sea. Find a way to live, eat, work, until it was time to die. If that could be called living.

  Or she could set a course toward a goal that no skill of foresight could yet teach her to see, reach over the horizon for something worth doing, worth fighting for.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  Anton Koffield smiled, and somehow the room got brighter. “Good,” he said. He laughed, and shook his head. “We make it sound as if we can head off right this minute and head straight for him. There are one or two details we need to sort out first.”

  “We’ll get them sorted,” she said, and there was no doubt of it in her voice, or in her soul. “We’ll see it through. We’ll find him. I’m sure of it. ‘I am hidden, but hidden where you can find me.’ We’ll track him down.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Anton replied. “We’ll find him.” He looked at her, straight in the eye, and his voice grew far more serious. “And after we do,” he said, “then will come the hard part.”

  Oskar DeSilvo’s power reserves were great, but they were not infinite. Every temporal-confinement field consumed vast amounts of energy, but one could realize a substantial power saving by setting the field to a less extreme time-dilation effect. If one let a hundred years go by in an apparent week, rather than an apparent hour, one could stretch out the field duration almost indefinitely.

  A smaller containment likewise consumed far less energy than a larger one. DeSilvo had therefore directed his Artlnts to construct the smallest containment possible. It was in truth no larger than a prison cell, and scarcely more comfortable. The food store, recycler, and sanitary facilities took up most of the compartment. He scarcely had room to turn around.

  But the sacrifice of space and comfort might well turn out to be a most prudent precaution. DeSilvo was well aware that he could be in the containment for a long, and unpredictable, period of time. What if Koffield failed to reach Solace, or, having arrived there, did not, for some reason, visit Greenhouse or learn of the tomb?

  DeSilvo had planned as best he could, but a thousand things could go wrong. If Koffield did not come, and did not open the confinement, the field was programmed to shut itself down after.three hundred years of objective time had passed, but that circuit, and its backups, could fail. Then he would be held in the containment until the power system finally failed, or, perhaps, until he died of old age, or simply went mad from confinement. It was conceivable that he would be trapped in the containment for hundreds, even thousands, of years of objective time—months or even years of apparent time, trapped in a cell scarcely large enough to serve as a decent closet.

  But he refused to believe in such things. Koffield would survive. It was obvious the man could survive anything. It was, after all, why DeSilvo had decided to make use of him.

  DeSilvo thought about it as he made up his simple evening meal, then prepared himself for bed. He slept a lot while in temporal confinement. There was little else to do.

  He entertained himself by imagining the scene in his head as he settled down to sleep. Koffield would find him. Koffield would shut down the confinement, and Admiral Anton Koffield would confront him, full of stern disapproval and righteous anger. Koffield would demand explanations, stand in judgment over all of DeSilvo’s moral lapses and failures of personal courage. He would question DeSilvo, interrogate him, insist that DeSilvo tell all.

  And then—

  —And then, Anton Koffield would get one or two surprises. Yes indeed.

  Somewhere and somewhen, hidden away in the temporal confinement that blocked out the passing years, Dr. Oskar DeSilvo smiled happily to himself, rolled over, and fell into a dreamless sleep, floating in the dark and quiet of the limitless depths of time.

  Glossary and Gazetteer of Terms, Places, Ships, etc.

  Artlnt—Artificial Intelligence. Any machine or device with sophisticated decision-making ability, and the capacity to interpret and execute complex orders. Generally speaking, Artlnts are deliberately built and programmed so as to be regarded as appliances and tools. Thus, while it is possible for them to speak and understand speech, they are usually designed to discourage any tendency to treat them as human.

  Circum Central Wormhole Farm—The timeshaft worm-hole linking Glister to other worlds, usable for transit to Solace as well. The name is an optimistic misnomer. Circum Central is not central to anything, and there is only one timeshaft there, though the term wormhole farm usually refers to three or more wormholes clustered near each other at a main transfer point. Circum Central was supposed to be much more important than it turned out to be.

  Chronologic Patrol—The military organization assigned to protect the timeshaft wormholes, and to defend against any deliberate or accidental attempt to abuse time travel so as to damage causality.

  Comfort—A large gas giant planet in the outer reaches of the same planetary system that holds Solace. The satellite Greenhouse orbits Comfort, and the SunSpot orbits Greenhouse.Downtime—Referring to events in or travel toward the past as regards a timeshaft wormhole. For a hundred-year timeshaft connecting 5100 a.d. and 5000 a.d., 5000 a.d. would be the downtime end.

  Glister—A terraformed planet near Solace that has suffered a climatic collapse.

  Grand Library—The ultimate storehouse of human knowledge, housed in a massive habitat orbiting Neptune. Two Permanent Physical Collections, or PPCs, serve as backups in the event of the Grand Library’s destruction. One PPC is in a different orbit of Neptune, while the other is buried in an undisclosed location on the farside of Earth’s Moon.

  Greenhouse—A rocky satellite of the gas giant Comfort, used as the research station and breeding support center for Solace. It is illuminated by the SunSpot.

  Habitat Seeds—Large and sophisticated self-actuating robotic machines programmed to seek out the raw materials for a space habitat, process the materials, and construct the hab with little or no human intervention. Typically, a Habitat Seed is released near a suitable stony-metal asteroid, which it mines as a source of raw materials. Habitat Seeds are one-shot items and cannot be reused because they self-cannibalize certain parts of themselves during the construction process. Furthermore, the seeds cannot manufacture all the items needed to construct a habitat; fo
r example, sophisticated electronics. Seeds carry such items as cargo, and cannot replenish their stores of them.

  Herakles DC—Cargo ship, Ship One of the convoy caught in the middle of the Second Battle of Circum Central. The Herakles IX was the only ship of the convoy to make it through the timeshaft wormhole. She completed her journey to Glister, but her captain was detained, and all data related to the battle were impounded, in order to prevent a time paradox. Ships Two, Three, and Four of the convoy were destroyed. See Stardrifter Gamma.

  Intruders—Name given, more or less by default, to the thirty-two ships that attacked and went through the Circum Central Timeshaft Wormhole, transiting from downtime to uptime, past to future.

  Lodestar—Local name of HS-G9-223, the star around which Solace orbits.

  Machine language—The name given to the specialized syntax and dialect used by Solacians when talking to voice-capable computers and Artlnts.

  Near-ancient, near ancients—Referring to a period of remote human history, or the people of that period. The near-ancient period is considered to start roughly with the Enlightenment, and ends roughly with the establishment of wormhole transit. Thus, from about 1740 a.d. to 3000 a.d.

  Objective time—The time or duration as measured by an outside observer. Typically used in regard to timeshaft-wormhole travel. A timeshaft ship might travel for one hundred years of self-chronologic time, and experience significant relativistic time dilation, but arrive only a week or so after departure in objective time, thanks to passage through a timeshaft wormhole. See self-chronologic time and subjective time.

  Self-chronologic time—The accumulated duration or age of an object, a person’s life, or an event, as it would be measured by a chronometer physically attached to an object or person, and ignoring the actual calendric time and date but accounting for relativistic time-dilation effects. Put another way, self-chron is a measure of how much an object or person has actually aged, regardless of time travel or cold sleep. A person who traveled, over the course of several trips, for five centuries in cryosleep, but traveled down five one-century wormholes, would have gone through five centuries of self-chron time, but have experienced virtually no subjective time, and might well end up in the same objective year from which he or she started. See objective time and subjective time.