The Depths of Time (48 page)

“
Answered by operations system, office, commander,
”
the Artlnt on the other end announced.
“
Instruction to caller: Confirm caller identity via voice check as Yuri Sparten.
”

“
Sparten confirming,
”
Yuri said.

“
Voice match,
”
the Artlnt replied, then fell silent, waiting for Yuri to speak.

“
Guests, two, from
Cruzeiro do Sul
arrived,
”
Yuri told the machine.
“
En route with same to office, commander. ETA approx twenty minutes. Immediate meeting with commander agreed.
”

“
Confirmation is redundant. Confirmation noted and logged.
”

Yuri nodded to himself, then shut off the phone and pocketed it without speaking further. No point in courtesy hellos and good-byes with machines. Especially when, as the Artlnt noted, the call was utterly redundant. But then, he had made the call for the benefit of his visitors, not the Artlnt. By calling in a confirmation, he had made the commander
’
s summons seem a bit more like a social invitation,
 
rather than the peremptory order it was. Yuri spent a good part of his time on such smoothing-over maneuvers. Commander Raenau was not known for his skill at diplomacy.

Yuri glanced at the lift
’
s floor indicator and saw they were getting close. He looked back down and noticed a quizzical expression on Chandray
’
s face.
“
The way you were talking just now,
”
she said.
“
I take it you were talking to a robot or some sort of machine?
”

“
That
’
s right,
”
Yuri said.
“
But why does that strike you as odd? Surely you had talking machines a hundred years ago.
”

“
Oh yes, of course we do—we did,
”
Chandray replied.
“
It
’
s the syntax, the patterns of how you talked to it. It
’
s almost like a distinct dialect. Now that I think of it, the traffic-control system had the same sort of odd speech patterns.
”
She frowned thoughtfully, and then her eyes lit up.
“
Is that it?
”
she asked.
“
A distinct speech pattern when addressing machines?
”

Maybe this Chandray woman wasn
’
t much for questions of etiquette, but she clearly was nobody
’
s fool.
“
Quite right,
”
he said.
“
Supposedly it was Founder DeSilvo
’
s own idea.
”

“
DeSilvo?
”
Koffield asked.

The name drew a strong reaction from both of them.
Another
interesting detail to note down.
“
It
’
s been handed down since his time, all through the Solace system. The machines can understand and use standard speech if need be, of course, but the convention is for them and us to use machine language whenever we interact. I think the idea is that if you speak to them in a way sufficiently unlike normal speech, you
’
ll always remember, at a subconscious level, that they
’
re not human. In a crisis, you won
’
t waste time shouting at them, or offering arguments or reasons that would only make sense to a human.
”

“
Subtle,
”
said Koffield, half to himself and half to Chandray.
“
Interesting, clever, and subtle. He always did know his way around machines.
”

Which strongly implied that Koffield had actually known DeSilvo! Yuri worked the dates out in his head and concluded there was nothing impossible in that. Yet one more useful, even fascinating, item for the debriefers.
“
Supposedly it
’
s a status marker as well,
”
Yuri said.
“
As least that
’
s what my social structure teachers called it. We use machine language to talk to robotic servants, but not to each other. It
’
s supposed to be good psychology, according to my teachers.
”

The lift car came to a halt at Perimeter Level, the habitable level closest to the outer, perimeter, hull of the station. The lift car
’
s doors opened, and the free-runner backed itself nimbly out, turned itself around, rolled down a side passage, and then out onto the Long Boulevard, the only route that ran the full length of the station.

Where once there had been bright light, laughter, and music, now there were only stripped-bare storefronts and the snarl of traffic. The smell, the stench, hit them as hard as a fist, and it would only get worse as they moved closer to Ring Park. The Long Boulevard had lost all her elegance, all her pride, all of it replaced by a wretched miasma of unwashed bodies and failed sanitation systems.

The Long Boulevard was no featureless transit tube, but the main thoroughfare for the station, the only one big enough and long enough to be considered a proper avenue if it were in a groundside city. It was so wide and tall in cross section that the station
’
s girth was noticeable. Yuri looked straight down the Boulevard, and caught a glimpse of the Aft End Cargo Center at the far end of the station, more than half a kilometer away.

Shops and stores, shipping offices and cafes, theaters and nightclubs lined both sides of the Boulevard. Walkways separated the stores from the central transport road. A pair of glass-walled transit tubes hung from the ceiling, but the Boulevard was a route for more than closed-route transport.

Free-ranging vehicles of all sorts crowded the two narrow vehicular lanes of the Boulevard. Robotic cargo haulers, pedal-powered quadracycles, private free-runners, and taxibots came on and went off the main road to and from all the side and upper accessways. As always, the Boulevard
’
s vehicular traffic looked to be on the verge of chaos, but Yuri was not concerned about it. The automated road-traffic-control system was highly competent, and would see to it that all the transports got where they were going.

It was the walkways and the shops—and the people in them—that had him worried. Day shift and night shift, around the clock, the Boulevard was ready to boil over into new trouble at any moment. The closer they got to Ring Park, the denser, shabbier, and more surly the crowds became.

Once, not so long ago, the shops had been smart, the shipping offices bustling, the cafes and clubs alive with the sights and sounds of people enjoying themselves. Now half the businesses were shuttered, and a few had been wrecked or burned out in the riots. Most of the establishments that were still open had very obviously armed guards on duty, and very heavy, very utilitarian metal grilles fastened over the display windows.

Anything and everything of any conceivable value, anything even remotely fragile, had long since been removed. Some of it smashed, stolen, the rest put out of harm
’
s way by the owners. All the signs, all the outdoor tables and chairs, were gone. Stripped of all decoration and on the defensive, the Boulevard was not itself anymore. It was nothing but a row of shabby little stresscrete bunkers barricaded against loiterers and malcontents, just barely hanging on. Business continued, but it was greatly changed and much diminished.

The free-runner slowed down in a particularly heavy knot of traffic. They came to a halt at the next intersection, and sat there, waiting to move again.

“
Refugees?
”
Koffield asked, nodding toward a knot of grimy, bewildered-looking men huddled together on a street corner. It surprised Yuri not at all that Koffield had been able to pick them out. Everything from their haircuts to the style of their clothing, from the gauntness of their faces to the dirt on their skin, shouted out that these were people who did not belong, people who had no place, people for whom there was no room.

“
Refugees,
”
Yuri said, trying to keep the anger and frustration out of his voice. The shabby men looked harmless, even pathetic. But those pitiable men, and their wives and children, had, simply by being on SCO Station, put the station in mortal danger. It had been luck as much as anything else that had kept it from utter collapse.

The normal station population was about four thousand, a little above the official
“
optimum
”
population of thirty-five hundred. At the peak of the crisis, there had been two thousand refugees on the station, over and above the normal population. The air-recirculation system had barely held, and the food supply had reached critical levels. Water, waste recirculation, general sanitation, medical services—everything had been stretched to the limit. There were still close to a thousand refugees on board, and they showed no sign of leaving. Things had gotten better, but service and supply systems that had never gotten a chance to recover were still under strain.

“
It
’
s hard to explain to outsiders,
”
Yuri said,
“
but for a lot of people, the worst of the refugee crisis wasn
’
t that they came and took everything we had. It was that they took it all and made nothing, less than nothing, out of it. Our air reserves are down to zero, the whole station is on short food and water rations, we
’
re completely out of all sorts of medicines—and it
’
s all gone for nothing. They
’
re still here, most of them no better off than the day they got here. It
’
s as if we had done nothing at all—and we did so much it nearly killed the station and everyone on it.
”

“
And you could do twice as much, and it would do no good,
”
Koffield said.
“
I do understand. I wish I didn
’
t. But I learned otherwise, when I wasn
’
t much younger than you are now. I was just another junior officer on just another colony-relief mission. All of the rescue team went around wondering how we had come to be so angry at the people we were trying to save.
”

Yuri nodded eagerly.
“
That
’
s it exactly, sir. Except that— well, you went out
intending
to rescue people. We just got the problem dumped in our laps.
”
Yuri shrugged.
“
We
’
re not angry all the time, of course. We feel for them. We care about them. I can
’
t really blame them for trying to stay.

Most of them came from places on the planet that are bad enough that no one in their right mind would want to go back, places that make the mess we
’
re in look like paradise.
”

“
Why did you allow them here in the first place?
”
Chandray asked.

“
It was out of our hands,
”
said Yuri.
“
Orders from the planetary government. The official policy was that whoever wanted to go could leave the planet. Probably that was even the right policy, even if it wasn
’
t too popular up here. It stopped the panic from getting worse. Most of the people who left the planet went back. But most of the ones who
didn’t
go back are on this station, though there are a few refugees on other stations. But we
’
re stuck with over ninety percent of them.
”

“
And now you
’
re stuck with two more,
”
Chandray said, half under her breath.

Yuri wasn
’
t sure if it was meant to be a joke, or even if he had been meant to hear it. For a moment or two, he considered treating it as one thing more that needed ignoring, but Chandray
’
s words came too close to the truth. They had to deal with the issue.
“
If I can be a bit reassuring, at least on that point, I can tell you that the Station Administrator does not regard you as being in the same category as the gluefeet.
”
He reddened as soon as the word was out of his mouth.

“
You call the refugees
‘
gluefeet
’
?
”
Chandray asked.

“
Ah, yeah. Gluefeet or gluefooters. Because they
’
re stuck here. You can
’
t get them to go.
”

No one spoke for a moment. Yuri was ashamed of himself. A fellow station-dweller would have understood and sympathized, but could these two? Yuri had started out believing, and wanting to believe, that the refugees were people just like anyone else. They might be displaced groundside peasants who had nothing in common with the engineers and traders who lived on the station, but people for all of that. But then came the endless trouble they caused, the crowding, the rationing, the riots—and the smell. There were times when Yuri felt he could forgive the gluefeet everything else, if only the camps didn
’
t smell so bad. It was getting harder and harder not to think of the refugees as the
enemy, as a willful source of trouble, as freeloaders who offered nothing and asked for everything. The station-dwellers equated the refugees with the squalor in which the refugees lived. It was hard, damned hard, to remember that the glue-feet had ever been anything else but a pack of filthy rabble.